Bomber

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Part of the reason for the ponderousness of Bomber is the literary weight of what Deighton is trying to do - conveying the brutality of war, the waste of a generation of young men, while making his portrayal evenhanded with the reader caring for people on both sides. The unpleasantness of twentieth century warfare and its wastefulness is a common theme from All Quiet on the Western Front to Mash, but it is far harder to think of other examples of war novels which do not just concentrate on one side. In many cases, the ability this gives to have a small number of central characters makes the writing more effective than it is here - the main characters in All Quiet on the Western Front form a single platoon of German soldiers, and M.A.S.H. never looks far beyond just two doctors. By contrast, there are dozens of characters in Bomber of approximately equal importance, which causes serious difficulties - they tend to be introduced with dull and lengthy biographical sketches, holding up the plot, and it is hard for the reader to remember who is who. (This second is a problem even in War and Peace, the most famous "cast of thousands" novel.) I certainly had the impression that Deighton's ambition here overreached his technique. Nevertheless, there are things to admire about the novel. Bomber is meticulously researched, with close attention to detail. (In current TV terminology, Bomber would definitely belong to the genre of docudrama.) SS-GB is as much a mystery thriller as anything else. Different details about how Archer has to go about his business in a bombed and occupied London, and about what underground resistance fighters are trying to do give the book its other-history character, but the core is how Archer finds himself manipulated by people playing a much larger game than he realizes. This is often a theme for Deighton, who sees espionage as a matter in which those in the front are often working for people they don't know who have agendas they would never dream of. They will be the ones who risk everything, even though the cause for which they do so might turn out to be less of a truth than they realize. Douglas Archer, Archer of the Yard, is an inspector at Scotland Yard, a near celebrity for the astuteness he has shown for solving cases. His boss is General Fritz Kellerman of the German army. His other boss is SS-Standartenfuhrer Dr. Oskar Huth, who is from Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. His Detective Sergeant is Harry Woods, a surrogate father who is a member of the resistance. His secretary Sylvia, who he was having a torrid affair with, has disappeared. Archer soon discovers that she too is a member of the resistance. The characters and plot are nothing that stands out, but that's all part of the subtle English charm of the book. It is a very, very gray novel. Even the Nazis refuse to be cast as genocidal monsters; merely self-interested conquerors who are taking advantage of the moment to loot everything not nailed down. And of course, there is little honor or glory in collaboration--even collaboration which might soften the iron grip of the Third Reich. I particularly enjoyed one exchange. August Bach, a German pilot, is returning to his base with his friend, Max, when they are held up by a convoy directed by Vichy police.

Brown, Geoffrey (February 1987). "The Thrillers and Spy Novels of Len Deighton". The Book and Magazine Collector. Diamond Publishing Group (35). ISSN 0952-8601. It`s very interesting to see the struggle for power inside the Nazi camp where we could find different parties with not so similar goals.

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Suddenly from the Liebefrau church there was a tremendous crash. A sheet of flame rose and sprinkled white-hot sparks across the roofs of the town.

An oddly blurry, non-atmospheric and largely unsatisfying alternate history "thriller" written in the '70s on the premise of "What if Hitler had managed to take the UK?". Len Deighton". Contemporary Authors. Gale. Archived from the original on 15 April 2016 . Retrieved 25 March 2016. (subscription required)Outside Europe and Japan, most people who give any thought to the Allies’s bombing missions in World War II think first, if not only, of the nuclear weapons that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But those who know are intensely aware that the loss of life in those two cities, horrific though it was, paled beside the toll of the British and US use of strategic bombing (or area bombing, as it’s sometimes known). The firebombing of Tokyo alone left 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. That’s about as many who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And it’s less than a third of the overall civilian death toll in Japanese cities, which was at least 333,000.

It is kind of funny, but it never hit me until I actually started reading the book that the title might be referring to England [GB] as being occupied by the Germans [SS]. Yeah, sometimes I am pretty darn slow on the uptake.Bomber was the first novel to be written on a word processor, the IBM MT/ST. [2] Plot summary [ edit ] Oberleutnant Victor Löwenherz, an aristocratic Luftwaffe night fighter pilot and his fellow crew members