This isn't a book you want to read too fast. It is easy to miss all the nuance and back-referencing if you treat it like a beach book. But what a terrific payoff.
First off, the detailed depiction of Berlin just after the end of WW2 is filled with accurate detail and a central character in its own right. The entire world seems to be detached from any sort of social framework, and the people -- both primary characters and incidental figures -- seem to be trying to play games of chess on a ship at sea during a storm. Nobody has general context; instead, against a background of completely uprooted German civilians, you have three nations each trying to impose its own structure, and it isn't like the teams representing the nations (US, USSR, Britain) are themselves unified or smooth-running. We don't see as much of the internal workings of the Soviet and British interests, but Kanon takes enough time to give us real flavor of the myriad loosely-connected components of the various US agencies, which often seem to be working at cross-purposes in the first several chapters.
Notably, there is a heated three-way argument between a pompous US Congressman who has apparently come to try to loot pieces of German industry for a corporation in his district, a Jewish civilian working for the Military Government (as opposed to the Army) to find and prosecute war criminals, and a rather supercilious British journalist with a needle for a tongue.
The characters themselves reflect the chaos; we are not given a great deal of background into any of them. For the most part, we only see what we can glean of their personalities from the four corners of the book itself.
Amidst this, the protagonist, Jake, a journalist who lived in Berlin before the war, is one of ten million people with ten million different missions, to find a woman he loved before the war, if she has survived. He inadvertently stumbles across the murder of a soldier he met on the flight into Berlin, giving him a second problem, because he finds that he is the only person even vaguely interested in discovering who committed the murder, and why.
You could read this through in a sitting or two as the kind of mystery you'd get off a grocery store rack, and you might enjoy it well enough. But the book is deceptively dense and filled with comment about the human condition, especially in the dislocation of a great war, as well as interesting insights about the dismantling and reconstitution of Germany by the three powers.
I loved the book and it gets five stars from me.
Oh, and by the way, do NOT watch the movie. It's the biggest disaster of a screen adaptation since "Bonfire of the Vanities".
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Reviews with images
Disgusted
I started to peel this trash off but I’m so upset by it that I decided to take a picture of it and write this review first. No wonder there are so many fools walking around right now completely clueless. How dare you put and allow this propaganda BS inside a book I bought. Take your holocaust denial else where! I’m completely disgusted by your store and it’s gross unethical push of ideologies to buyers like me.
Top reviews from other countries
Andy Blanche
Another powerful and well crafted novel from this writer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 4, 2023
M Clark
A look at Berlin immediately after the war
Reviewed in Germany on March 14, 2021