Piers Paul Read's The Junkers is written in the first person, the narrator is roughly the same age as the author and the book is set in Germany where Read has lived, but you don't for a moment feel that he is dishing up a chunk of personal experience with himself at the centre of a group of his acquaintances dressed in false names and noses. The main character is a young British diplomat posted in the 1960s to Berlin where he falls romantically and credibly in love with a German girl, Suzi…. [Research into her] family's history provides a vivid account of the rise of the Nazis before the Second World War, some scenes of SS bestiality described with a careful restraint that intensifies the horror, and a penetrating and sympathetic study of the type of brave and patriotic German soldier who was also a devout Christian, agonised by his growing realisation that his Fuehrer was not merely fallible but the incarnation of total evil. The flashbacks mesh smoothly with the development of the narrator's affair with Suzi and the novel is organised with unobtrusive but masterly skill. (p. 808)
Vernon Scannell, "Enjoying the Ride," in New Statesman (© 1968 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 75, No. 1944, June 14, 1968, pp. 808-09.∗
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