Review: The Boys From Brazin - Ira Levin
Played out as a cat-and-mouse thriller, The Boys From Brazil follows Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman and notorious Nazi scientist Josef Mengele as they pursue each other across the world. Meanwhile, Mengele's machination to create the 'fourth reich' unfurls with a plot to kill 94 seemingly unimportant men. The key to how they are linked is a mystery played out on the page, and the pieces of the puzzle come together frighteningly and somewhat comedically in a story that highlights the absurdity of post-war fascists and the mania that drove them.
To begin with, the style of writing did leave something to be desired. It was unimaginative and repetitive, filled with characters who appear once and never again, and paragraphs stocked with the verb 'went'. The beginning of the story was purely driven by intrigue, as the prose style was lacking, giving it a script-like feel, like I was reading instead of watching a movie, and I found myself struggling in the first fifty or so pages to find the motivation to keep going. However, once the mysteries stacked up, there was little need to focus on the mundanities of pacing a room, and so the pace picked up fluently.
The hate between the two main characters was perhaps the most compelling and most prominent relationship in the novel. The way Lieberman knew it was Mengele on the phone without needing to hear a word, describing the feeling of hate that came through the receiver, was bone-chilling. Yet I found it unconvincing that he didn't recognise his nemesis when confronting him face to face, and it took analysing his accent to figure it out.
On a lighter note, I found the passive nature vs nurture debate to be a compelling device in the solving of the mystery: would it be possible to manufacture a young Hitler through recreating his genetic makeup and relevant life events? I found it interesting that the characters forgot to factor in the social and political climate that the original Hitler grew up in, and only focused on the domestic aspects. All this despite the ongoing debate about whether a fascist regime was possible in the 70's and beyond (the protagonist pointedly said 'no.')
These debates weren't in dialogue with each other in the novel, which was disappointing to say the least, though each had interesting points and connections to make across time. I believe, despite its faults, the novel makes prevalent arguments for the improvements of society and is optimistic that those improvements will make it harder and harder for fascism to rise again. The novel ends with an unnamed one of the 94 prospective Hitlers making ambiguous manifestations about his future, giving the story an uncertain end. When considering the arguments made previously, the reader is left on the side of hope, but the wariness is still there.
The novel plays out comedically, suspensefully, shedding light on a lesser-represented focus of the post-war era: ensuring the remaining sees of Hitler's regime never take root again. The characters were compelling and, if unlikeable, evoked strong feelings of hate that were just as effective in making me want to read further. I'm rating it 3/5 for this reason, though it loses points for the somewhat tiring reading experience and disconnected though pertinent debates explored across it.