BOOK REVIEW
Up in Honey's Room, by Elmore Leonard, 292 pp, 2008 Phoenix paperback, Available at Asia Books and leading book stores, 350 baht
BERNARD TRINK
Octogenarian Yank author Elmore Leonard, with over 40 books to this credit, is still at it. His stories alternate between crime fiction and Western shoot-'em-uppers, more than a few adapted to the screen. No other writer gets down the lingo so well. Having lived through much of the 20th century, he remembers things that seemed important at the time but have long since been forgotten by the vast majority.
In Up in Honey's Room, Leonard reminds us of the universal practice during conflicts of interning enemy aliens. They may well be spies, saboteurs, at least sympathetic to the foe. Though protesting their loyalty to their adopted country can they be believed, trusted? After the war the respective governments apologise for their suspicion and mistreatment, yet the fact remains that there were those who rooted for the Fatherland.
During WW II, the US found itself in a dilemma. It had taken on the Axis powers, whose immigrants had been settling there for centuries. There were no facilities to handle millions of German and Italian aliens. The Japanese were something else again, restrictive acts keeping their number down, making interning them feasible.
Leonard's most recent novel focuses on the Germans in the States during the 1930s and '40s. As he tells it through his characters, they generally had mixed feelings about the old country and the new, whether born there and brought by their parents or foaled in the US. Hitler's Mein Kampf was turgid, but he was responsible for making the Third Reich a world power to be reckoned with. His opposition deserved to be harshly dealt with.
As for America, every effort should be made to have it grow and prosper. Its dynamism had much in common with Germany's. With the coming of war, GIs fought and died overseas and Wehrmacht PoWs tested German-American loyalties. Honey Deal, of German ancestry living in Detroit, gives refuge to an escaped German prisoner of war. A German in the US Marshals Service comes looking for him and becomes her lover as well.
Honey's ex-husband, a Himmler lookalike, means to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ukrainians appear on the scene, on a mission to kill Nazis in America. Enter the FBI, with good intentions but poor intelligence. Honey extends her favours to a special agent. Bodies pile up. The story is serious, yet not heavy. With weapons changing hands, we aren't certain who will shoot whom until the triggers are pulled.
The war lost, the Nazis in the States have lost interest in returning to Germany. One has fallen in love with a Jew. Another has hopes of riding bulls in contests. Honey has yet to find Mr Right, grumbling that German food isn't good for her figure. The reader is left with the feeling that the personae will disperse to different parts of the country and make their own way in life.
A good quote: "This lovely boy from Odessa who killed with ease having seen hundreds and hundreds of people gassed, shot against walls, shot with pistols against their heads, hung from streetlights, locked in rooms and burned alive, all of it a part of Bo's coming-of-age." Reading Elmore Leonard is addictive.
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