skygiants | (no subject)

I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.

The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.

Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.

ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.

And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then towards the end of the book Max finally finds his mother, in a concentration camp, and runs up against the end of his Plucky Child Protagonist powers: he can't rescue her, so he leaves her his kobold and dybbuk to help her hold on and survive.

To me this is the most interesting thing that happens in the book. I find it genuinely moving and compelling and also such a weird beat. These guys have not been numinous! They're Statler and Waldorf, they're children's-book Disney companion gargoyles! What are they going to do for this full adult woman who is emphatically not living in a children's adventure novel, who represents the hard limit of the kind of human tragedy that a children's adventure novel can fix? It's a wild question to leave us with, and I think I kind of respect it; at least, I keep thinking about it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

From:

thistleingrey

Yes, likewise. Even though parking the dybbuk and kobold there seems like a good expression of things being too much to navigate in a story, I would read any sincere attempt.

From:

skygiants

There's this sort of fascinating shadow novel running through the book, where there's High Stakes Adventure but you know this is happening, that's the whole point (and indeed -- spoilers -- guvf qbrf vaqrrq ghea bhg gb or gur jubyr cbvag; ng gur raq, jura ur trgf onpx gb Ratynaq, ur ernyvmrf gung Rjra Zbagnth (!) arire npghnyyl rkcrpgrq uvz gb fhpprrq ng uvf Rfcvbantr Cebwrpg, ohg QVQ svther gung ur jbhyq rkcyvpvgyl qvfborl nyy vafgehpgvbaf tvira gb uvz abg gb frrx bhg uvf cneragf, naq oevat onpx pbasvezngvba bs gur rkvfgrapr bs gur pnzcf gung rirelbar ng gung cbvag jnf fgvyy qralvat.)

From:

lilysea

Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy

Yeah, I was immediately like "there were pogroms! and Jewish people were expelled from England! and there were times when the Catholic church went 'convert to Christianity or die!' "

I looked up Wikipedia and:

"The first recorded anti-Jewish riots took place in Alexandria in the year 38 CE, followed by the more known riot of 66 CE.

Other notable events took place in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Jewish communities were targeted in 1189 and 1190 in England and throughout Europe during the Crusades and the Black Death of 1348–1350, including in Toulon, Erfurt, Basel, Aragon, Flanders and Strasbourg.

Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed during this period, extending further to the Brussels massacre of 1370.

On Holy Saturday of 1389, a riot began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; the number of dead was estimated at 400–500 men, women and children.

Attacks against Jews also took place in Barcelona and other Spanish cities during the massacre of 1391.

The brutal murders of Jews and Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine, then within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth."

From:

skygiants

yep, and I realize that the kobold and the dybbuk like all of us experience nostalgia and the lie of memory that tells us that the lost past is better than the miserable present, AND YET

From:

genarti

IT'S SUCH A WEIRD BOOK. I have so many arguments with it! And yet it is doing so many things so well and interestingly and ambitiously! And yet I have so many arguments with it on other fronts!

For me (as you know) I also partly had the problem where midway through you think of a way to fix the plot, and then you keep trying to shape the novel in your head to match the plot fix-it you've thought of, but since this is a published book well past the concrit stage it will not change to fit your idea. But the version of it in my head, which is almost identical except that the dybbuk and/or kobold has a genuinely supernatural Trust This Kid And Tell Him The Truth, He's Your Friend kind of mindwhammy power that Max has to wrestle with the ethical implications of, and that they can also bring to bear for his mother, is simply a much better book, in my opinion.

From:

osprey_archer

I honestly feel that particular fix would have solved almost everything unbelievable in either of these two books and also would not have required THAT many changes, especially if Max didn't realize for a long time until finally he's like "WHY are all these people TELLING me these things they should NOT be sharing," at which point Statler and Waldorf are like "oh it's because we mind-whammied them." If it's late enough in the duology, it's a nice twist and you can have a bit about the Ethics of Mind-Whammying without detracting from the other ethical points that are really more central to Gidwitz's project.

However unfortunately Gidwitz did not think to ask us while still in edits. Maybe we just... assume Statler and Waldorf are doing this secretly... and never tell Max because Max never asks.

From:

mific

Gidwitz clearly needed a beta reader who would say to him, look, this thing with the kobold and dybbuck mind-whammying everyone to tell Max the truth, it's not coming through as obvious. Make it more explicit and that'll also help with his mother being left in the camp at the end, as if she has their help it might give her more of a fighting chance to survive.

From:

asakiyume

He needed to have invented atemporal beta consultation so he could have benefited from you guys's suggestions...

From:

skygiants

I think that Gidwitz would frankly love to have an aside about the Ethics of Mind-Whammying! it really would have been doing him a huge favor had he just asked us!

From:

asakiyume

Thinking of what

osprey_archer says, maybe this is where hardcore head canon comes into play?

From:

skygiants

for sure -- everything makes perfect sense, as long as you assume there is a significant level of magic going on that we are simply not being told about at any point

From:

skygiants

IT REALLY WOULD MAKE SO MUCH MORE SENSE

From:

chestnut_pod

Then towards the end of the book Max finally finds his mother, in a concentration camp, and runs up against the end of his Plucky Child Protagonist powers: he can't rescue her, so he leaves her his kobold and dybbuk to help her hold on and survive. -- just this summarizing sentence gestures at a novel of complete heartbreak that sounds VERY different from the book as it is!

On the topic of completely different books, your explanation of how the book treats Nazism and the various official and semi-official relationships people had with the party and the Reich really does sound more nuanced and interesting --however didactic-- than what goes on in The English Patient, which I just read for lack of other options on a plane.

From:

skygiants

The thing is that the anger and heartbreak really does run through the book -- you have the kid protagonist and his Disney shoulder companions sort of desperately running through the implausibly successful beats of an espionage adventure and on both a Watsonian and a Doylistic level it feels like that's all that is keeping the whole thing from dissolving into despair, which tbh makes for a really interesting tension in and of itself.

lololol I have never read The English Patient and this mini review does not incline me to change my status in that regard

From:

asakiyume

I wonder if, having left the dybbuk and the kobold with the mother, Gidwitz realized what a door he'd opened. Or what, just generally, he was thinking. I wonder this extra-textually--I'm not thinking about it in terms of criticism or understanding of this story, but just out of curiosity about the guy.

From:

skygiants

tbh I think he did realize -- it's a huge turning point in the book, there's a mysterious gap when Max disappears from the narrative and returns with the dybbuk and kobold gone, and then the scene at the concentration camp is told in flashback at the end in a way that implied to me that Gidwitz felt this was the most important thing in the text, the thing he'd really wanted to build towards all along.

From:

asakiyume

And then that makes me wonder if it's something like acknowledging--or maybe it's not acknowledging, maybe it's a wish, or a prayer--that everything dybbuk and golem mean can/will come into their fullness with this adult in need. And that maybe this gift is giving the adult, the mom, something that she may have despaired of. But now it's back. ... I realize that's totally different from how they've been used in the duology, but things can undergo a metamorphosis.

IDK though, maybe it's nothing like that at all!

From:

aella_irene

These books sound really interesting, and remind me of another series I was reading for a while.

Before she went Full TERF, the author Jane Thynne was writing the Clara Vine novels, set from 1930-1941, which are a series of murder mysteries where one protagonist is Clara herself (came to Germany c. 1930 to break into the film industry, stayed because she'd been recruited by British Intelligence* and also gained responsibility for an adolescent boy after her best friend had a window related accident), and the other, changing each book, is a girl or woman who has bought into Nazi ideology, but is also coming to the point where, for whatever reason, they are no longer able to keep buying into it, and one of the things I enjoyed about them was that Thynne was very good at having these women, who are part of a monstrous ideology, and participating in monstrous acts, are not reducible into Monsters and Not Monsters, though some of them are becoming more reducible. Being awful does not mean they are happy, and it does not mean that Clara takes pleasure in their misery. It also does not mean that the other narrators deserve to get involved in brutal civilian murders, even as the ability to solve murders under the Nazi regime becomes ever slighter, and the effect becomes increasingly useless.

*She is not part of the inner circle of high Nazi women exactly, but a lot of them keep coming and sitting on her sofa to complain about the others.

From:

skygiants

man, I had never heard of Jane Thynne or these books and I wish I'd come across them beforehand, because they sound fascinating!

From:

aella_irene

It is so weird that the same woman who wrote those books also signed a letter saying that JKR is great and why are people being so mean! And annoying. Very annoying, because they are really good books.