By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Bob Van Laerhoven is no stranger to the blog and no stranger to heartbreaking tragic prose and fascinating but morally ambiguous characters. Alejandro’s Lie focused on the release of a revolutionary hero released from a Latin American political prison and has to deal with life on the outside where many of his fellow rebels have died or conformed as well as face his own dubious reasons for fighting the power. Shadow of the Mole features an enigmatic psychiatric patient who writes a strange tale of history and magical realism that draws in his primary doctor who becomes obsessed with learning the patient's real identity.
The anthology Scars of the Heart explores the dark hearts and minds of various characters like a Syrian terrorist, an octogenarian from war-torn Algiers, a cynical reporter, a selfless nun, and a disillusioned child soldier trying to escape conflict in Liberia, two paranoid and disturbed New Yorkers with violent delusions about alien abductions, a Romany girl using her body and desire for vengeance in a WWII concentration camp, and a sexual abuse survivor in 1970’s Belgium having to come to terms with the trauma that he held onto all of these years.
Van Laerhoven’s latest book The Long Farewell does what he has already succeeded in and does it well. He takes his themes, plots and characters up to eleven in this WWII Psychological Thriller about family dysfunction, the remaining scars of war and genocide, and the pursuit of justice and vengeance.
The story begins in Nazi Germany where Hermann Becht lives with his SS officer father, Hans, and Belarusian refugee mother, Marina. After a violent encounter, Hermann and Marina flee Germany for France where Hermann’s hatred for Hans and the party that he represented grow until he signs up as a spy for Britain.
This book focuses on one man's survival in trying times as he tries to reconcile the various political and nationalistic views that surround him and his own damaged and fractured psyche after he comes face to face with the darkest, most subterranean dehumanizing acts that people can do to others.
Hermann lived in a time where nationalism was just about everything. It was used as an intentional weapon for discrimination, genocide, and declarations of war. This nationalism can also be found in Hermann's own family. In fact, his dysfunctional family structure is a microcosm of the effects that the Nazis and other oppressive regimes had over the countries that they conquered.
We see that in the wide setting of Nazi Germany as the oppressive authoritarian regime spreads through the continent of Europe and how it impacts the Becht household. Hans, rules his home with an iron fist and fills it with an overinflated sense of racial and national superiority. He is a very toxic presence in his household, dominating his family with physical and verbal abuse just as Hitler used dominant and abusive language to become a toxic presence to the world.
The counter to Hermann’s father is his mother. While Han’s nationalism is rooted in dominance and superiority, Marina’s is one of fluidity, transition, oppression, and a nostalgic return to the past. She yearns for the country that she left behind but has now been occupied and carved up by outside forces. It only exists in her dreams so she is carried along by her son in a present that she no longer wants to live in.
Hermann recognizes the Nazi threat embodied by his father and the lost nostalgia reflected in his mother so he has had to make some tough decisions. These decisions lead him to flee to Paris and join the war front from inside the shadows. He has seen the darkness in his family and former country and now wants to help end it.
Hermann is moved by the plight of others, particularly a Jewish family that he has befriended and have also been separated and divided by the Holocaust. But he is also motivated by his own private war with his father, Hans. He uses cunning, strategy, stealth, double cross hiding in the shadows to defeat the enemy that is right out in the open and changing Europe into something cruel and unrecognizable.
However, the clandestine life only takes Hermann even further into darkness as he investigates concentration camps. He comes face to face with the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt spoke about, the banality that allows cruel inhumane things to happen to people who are seen as “The Other.” Torture, surgical mutilation, dehumanization, assault, physical abuse, gaslighting, extermination, and genocide.
These are things that enter into the darker reaches of the human soul the more they are studied. Things that leave permanent haunting marks on the mind and in Hermann's case completely alter it into something unrecognizable.
That is what Van Laerhoven shows us.
