Title: The Splendid and the Vile
Rating: 5 Stars
Erik Larson’s writing process is kind of insane. He writes narrative history. I’ve previously read The Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, and Thunderstruck. His novels all read like fiction thrillers. They’re full of fleshed out characters, intense plot, and fascinating conversations.
Here’s the thing. Everything that he writes about actually happened and he can prove it. He gets conversations from diaries or other first hand sources. He dives deep into historical sources to get the original story.
He does this for every sentence that he writes. For example, if in one of his books, he has a sentence that reads something like, “As he walked down the street, he wiped his brow in the early morning heat as he breathed in the fresh aroma of coffee and oranges.” He will have a weather report for that day that will tell him if it was hot enough at that hour of the day to induce a sweat. He’ll have a map of businesses on the street (from the early twentieth century, these would be sourced from fire departments since they needed to know what kind of fires they might be fighting). From that map, he’ll see that there’s a coffee roasting company. From a newspaper from that day, he’ll read that a horse drawn cart full of crates of oranges tipped over that morning on that street. From those three different sources, he managed to construct the one sentence.
He does this essentially for every sentence in the book. The Splendid and the Vile is about 500 pages. I personally find that attention to detail to be mind boggling.
If that’s not impressive enough, not only does he manage to write an entire book using this method, but he manages to tell a compelling, at times breathtaking story.
Of course, it helps to have a compelling story to tell, and it’s hard to find a historically more fraught time than Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. Begrudgingly approved by the King, he took office in May, 1940. At that moment, the British Expeditionary Force was in full retreat from a ferocious Nazi offensive. The British was counting on the French to hold back the Nazis to allow them time to prepare for the looming war. Instead, the French were just days away from surrender.
The UK was about to face the Nazis alone. They would continue to fight them alone until the Nazis made the ill fated decisions to invade the Soviet Union and to declare war on the US upon Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
During the time that it stood alone, it seemed inevitable that a Nazi invasion of the British island was imminent. The aerial attacks, now known as the Battle of Britain, that killed tens of thousands of English citizens, was fought during this period.
So, this is a thrilling time. All of the major figures show up on these pages. Members of Churchill’s family like his daughter Mary, son Randolph, wife Clementine, and daughter-in-law Pamela are all here. American’s such as Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman that were helpful to the British war effort fill the pages. All characters are richly described and come vibrantly to life.
At the center of it all is Winston Churchill. To put it mildly, he is a complex figure. At times he was ebullient, dancing and singing to a gramophone. Other times, he is disconsolate, barely able to get out of bed. With little personal vanity, he would walk around No 10 Downing wearing nothing but a silk robe or an absurd one piece air raid suit that everyone called his jumper. He had an early conversation with President Franklin Roosevelt completely naked (well, except for his ever present cigar and glass of whiskey).
Whatever his faults, he was exactly what the British needed. His speeches on the radio never minimized the desperate struggle that they were in but gave the people confidence that they will see it through. His tours of bombed out cities brought the shelled out citizens running out to this car just to be in his presence. Despite his apparent lack of concern for his own safety (watching nearby bombings from the roof of No 10 Downing or speeding through the streets of London at breakneck speeds), he was the indispensable leader of the West during that first year of combat.
This reads like an action novel. Following the format of such novels, this is a work of many short chapters (101 chapters over 500 pages). Following the same format, most chapters end with a cliffhanger that make you want to dive into the next chapter. I found myself easily plowing through 100 pages at a sitting.
And just like any good action novel, you have to have a good villain. Here, you have the words of Goebbels. Head of the Nazi propaganda ministry, at first he has only contempt for Churchill and the British. He keeps waiting for Churchill to be thrown out and to bring the British to their knees. At first furious with their intransigence, by the end he has developed something approaching a begrudging respect for both the British leader and their people.
And, best of all, like in all good action novels, the good guys win.
dorkenstein 