Kevin Myers: The processes which bring a book from keyboard to best-seller are every bit as mysterious as those comparable forces which make a hit film. The truth is, no one knows what they are.
Not merely is there no certain formula for success, but the vital ingredients of what is successful are as immune to analysis as Coca-Cola; equally resistant to scrutiny are the reasons for meritorious failure. However, one ingredient - by its absence or presence - is absolutely vital and that is luck.
Alan Judd is probably the finest unlucky writer in Britain; and if his wretched luck holds, then his splendid novel The Kaiser's Last Kiss, recently published by HarperCollins, is likely to creep into the undergrowth of uncelebrity like a wounded animal, as did most of his other works with the notable exception of A Breed of Heroes. He is possibly one of those writers who are "discovered" only when they have exchanged their quills for a full set of wings, and few things quite tarnish the splendours of paradise so much as the knowledge that, down below, one is finally being fêted.
The Kaiser's Last Kiss is based on a brilliant historical conceit. Emperor Wilhelm II was still in exile in the Netherlands when the Low Countries fell to the Nazis in 1940. This seldom remembered fact has enabled Alan Judd to engineer a fictional meeting between him and Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, prompting dark questions about the accession to power of the wholly unsuited: for the Kaiser was a profoundly damaged man, both mentally and physically, and Himmler was a sad, pathetic fantasist, yet one who got to live out his diseased dreams on the stage of Europe.
Arguably, they were the two most important men of the 20th century. Without the Kaiser's insane military ambitions, fuelled by a profound sense of personal inferiority, there would have been no Great War. And from that war flowed, in full flood, the evils which defined the 20th century: communism and fascism. And no single project in the sea of consequences rising from the cataract of 1914 matches the diabolism of Himmler's genocide of Europe's Jews.
Yet this pair were not strutting, barking madmen: they were the embodiment of Hannah Arendt's now clichéd observation about the banality of evil. Himmler was personally modest, a socialist and revolutionary who dispensed with many of the courtesies due his rank. A fastidious, almost clerkly man, he was nonetheless exceedingly attractive to women, and fathered many children. He was only 29 when he took command of the SS, just 33 when he founded his first concentration camp at Dachau, 36 when he took command of the Gestapo.
The Kaiser's ego had led his country, his empire, and Europe to utter ruin; and as Alan Judd reminds us, after his abdication he spent the following decades in Holland cutting down trees with his one good arm: thousands of trees, year after year.
There, now, is something to savour: the obsessive tree-killer meets the obsessive Jew-killer.
The most daring ploy in The Kaiser's Last Kiss is to make the hero, through whose perceptions and actions most of the narrative flows, an SS officer, Untersturmführer Martin Krebbs. It says something about the SS that all ranks above senior lance-corporal right through to general contained the title "fürer". This was leadership-worship at its most depraved. For the SS consisted largely of serious, dedicated Nazis - and to make a likeable, almost admirable, central character an SS man such as Krebbs requires very great skill indeed.
But that of course is the ghastly truth. Krebbs is simply a character of his time. His opinions are abominable - he thinks, for example, that dogs can smell Jews. But such olfactory racism was commonplace in those days: the Americans tried to train dogs to sniff out Japanese, using ethnic Japanese Hawaiians as bait. Of course, they failed.
Evil usually wears an urbane, concerned look on its face, and it usually involves a moral complexity which few novelists care to deal with. This is why Alan Judd has written such an important book. He evades satisfying simplicities, even when quite early on we are introduced to the leitmotif of the work: the recreational massacre of defenceless British POWs by the SS at Le Paradis in 1940. This stands for all that the Nazis are about to do in the years we know lie ahead.
Alan Judd does more than tackle the mighty ethical problems of a good man engaged in an evil undertaking; he writes in limpid, studied and elegant prose, and his mastery of military matters derives in part from his own soldiering background.
Yet for all his range of talents, Alan Judd falls outside the charmed circle of review-and-acclaim. Once one is in there, often enough with a work of merciless incomprehensibility, one usually stays in it, to be shortlisted for the Booker and to feature regularly in newspaper profiles. You know the extended, fashionable metropolitan set: Barnes-Amis-Smith-Okri.
Alan Judd has written a quite superb account about a vital point in world history, touched by all those issues common to us all: love, sex, doubt, courage, weakness and loyalty. What does a good man do when he finds that he is sworn to do evil? This is the central paradox which is confronted by Krebb; it was indeed the central paradox that was presented to the human race in the 20th century.
The Kaiser's Last Kiss is an extraordinarily fine book, rich in wisdom, and blessed with sparkling historical erudition; and I have not seen it reviewed anywhere.