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Sep. 24th, 2025 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI 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.
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.
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Date: 2025-09-25 04:11 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2025-09-25 02:52 pm (UTC)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.
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