The V2 was a costly, grim success: the rockets killed about 2,700 men, women and children and injured 6,500. Approximately 20,000 houses were destroyed and 580,000 damaged. Recognising the Germans’ knack with rocketry, the United States recruited about 1,000 of them with appropriate technical skills. Von Braun was eager to take his talents to America. As this excellent novel makes clear, he was a perfect model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.
Harris’s career to date has been pleasingly unpredictable, moving between the ancient world and the 20th century, from politics to high finance. It’s peculiar, then, that so much of V2 feels familiar. He wrote it during the lockdown and yet no sense of this feeds through to the reader. Living through historical times, our historical novels have to work harder to justify their existence. Harris’s books are always supremely readable – he has practically trademarked the term “master storyteller” – but V2 doesn’t tell us enough about the way we live now.
Yet while Harris renders the historical detail with his customary verisimilitude, V2 lacks a certain va-va-boom. It perhaps succeeds as a literary novel, but as a thriller it never quite takes off.
Set over five days, the pace is relentless. You can be staring at the exhaust of a rocket in the sky over Scheveningen in Holland, flick a page, and be in Chancery Lane, feeling the tiny change in air pressure that comes just before a supersonic missile lands. There are times, though, when Harris stops the story dead to hover over a detail that brings the horror of the V2 to life.... Written mostly during lockdown at a time of international political turmoil, Harris is delivering a warning about toxic futility and the ferocious propaganda needed to fuel it. His timing is, unlike the workings of the rockets he writes about, impeccable.
Told with Harris's meticulous eye for detail, and his appetite for the human story at the heart of any drama, it is as compelling as one of the great British black-and-white war films, with a sprinkling of contemporary detail to add colour.
With its tense plot and familiar characters, some readers may anticipate the novel’s own parabolic curve. But this means it offers the satisfactions we expect. Spies and informers lurk. Period details are piquant, but not overdone. Kay eats eggs “too chewy to be anything other than powdered”. Each WAAF is allowed four inches of hot water a week. Names of military ranks and units are all present and correct. Technical sections about the rockets, though occasionally droning, are astonishingly precise.
Above all there’s suspense. As Graf and Kay plot and counterplot, questions rise and fall like rockets. Will Kay calculate in time to enable destruction of the site? Will Graf stay dutiful or defect? Will Kay and Graf ever share the same chapter? V2 will keep you pinned on a compelling trajectory.
His prose can be wonderfully vivid – one explosion leaves “human remains and fragments of uniform hanging from the blasted fir trees like grisly Christmas decorations” – but he is not above using the laziest of clichés. Dr Graf refers to an interrogation by two Gestapo officers as a “good cop/bad cop routine” – an unlikely usage in the 1940s. Harris has the great gift of readability; there is no living novelist whose books I am likelier to gobble up in one sitting. Is this an entirely appropriate response to a novel about the war, however? When I read Philip Kerr’s thrillers, for example, I frequently have to put them down because he gives such a powerful sense of the misery and inhumanity of the period.
