Synopsis
Peter Vansittart has been acclaimed as Englands greatest living historical novelist. Published to coincide with Vansittarts 85th birthday, 'Secret Protocols' begins with the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939 which triggers an extraordinary odyssey for Erich, the son of a Baltic Baron and an English mother.
Revue de presse
Becalmed as we are upon the stagnant waters of three-for-two promotions, the Ottakar's capitulation and Richard and Judy, it is worth asking whatever happened to that staple of bygone English literary life, the highbrow novel. The answer is that, if now increasingly the fiefdom of small independent firms, the highbrow novel is still sticking to its guns, thanks very much. In an indifferent marketplace comes Peter Vansittart's Secret Protocols, a novel which follows the aesthetic template of these exemplars by making no concessions whatever to its prospective readers. To anyone raised on the McEwan-and-water orthodoxies of contemporary British fiction, the view from Vansittart's Mount Olympus can be a bracing experience. For a start, there is the sense of a ferocious intellect burning unappeasably away, writing exactly what it likes without giving a damn about the Waterstone's buyer or the prize jury. Then there is the rapt cosmopolitanism of the gaze: not westward across the Atlantic, but back into the heart of an old Europe which, for all the anaesthetising effect of post-war politics, still seems very much alive. Dense, allusive, with all kinds of buried sub-texts poking up from beneath its surface, Vansittart's work often seems to operate by way of a series of barely recognisable codes, a view of history so thronged with detail that it practically needs foot-noting. Perhaps, in the end, such layering doesn't matter: literature is still literature, after all, whether re-imagined by the book club browser or the deconstructionist from Yale. As he is now in his 86th year - his first reviews were commissioned by George Orwell for the left-wing weekly Tribune - Vansittart's perspective is necessarily long-term. Erich, his super-reflective hero, grows up in a powerfully realised pre-war Estonia, the child of an English mother and a high-caste Germanic father, who in moments of irritation can be found murmuring the expletive "Hegel". News of European power politics is b --D.J.Taylor Independent on Sunday
This is a book like no other: grandly powerful, illumined by knowledge, insight, originality, evocative of the depths and elations bought upon the individuals by the instigators of history and the quirks of chance. Let us celebrate Peter Vansittart as a literary treasure of our time. --Sybille Bedford
The advance publicity for Secret Protocols announces that this is Peter Vansittart's "final" novel. Since, unlike most ordinary folk, writers rarely have a fixed retirement date, I would assume that either the author himself has decided that 85 is a reasonable age to give up or, more likely, that his publishers regard this hugely ambitious, sweeping novel to be a fitting climax to a distinguished career. As, indeed, it is. Vansittart is remarkable for being a carefully accurate historian who is also a splendidly imaginative writer of fiction, and he has made good use of both talents in Secret Protocols. It is a novelised history, stretching from the beginning of the second world war to the present day; and the manner of its telling makes for a skilled and highly original story. Secret Protocols is not an idle read for the beach or a sleepy bedtime, but it wonderfully repays a little alert attention. I found myself, time and time again, going back to check my own memory of the events chronicled in Vansittart's clever, stylish prose, and finding aspects of them that I had forgotten. This is a book to reread and savour; powerful and unique. --Nina Bawden, The Guardian
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