An Honorable German by Charles McCain (A review)

[Iron Budokan]

An Honorable German by Charles McCain comes across as a mish-mash of different other novels and books cobbled together in an effort to draw an overarching look at the moral character growth of a German Naval Officer in WWII.

Too bad he doesn't bring it off.

There's a lot of structural problems with this book, beginning with the first seven chapters which read as if they were tacked on during the editorial process to help give the novel breadth. We have the sabotaged U-boat scene lifted right out of Herbert Werner's excellent Iron Coffins as well. But McCain doesn't stop there. He even draws upon Werner's own reflections of his father's infidelity with someone not considered "racially qualified" according to the narrow-minded Nazi ideal. It's little plot points like this that are so glaringly lifted (though changed more than enough to avoid any definitive accusation of plagiarism) which permeate the book and grate upon the well-read U-boat aficionado.

More stupefying is the actual book notes which claim this novel is in the tradition of Das Boot and Hunt for Red October. Yeah, not so much, because like I said the first seven chapters of McCain's protagonist, Max Brekendorf, takes place upon the Graf Spee and then a German raider in the North Atlantic. (Though to be fair, we must give McCain some leeway on this. As a professional writer of fiction myself, I know only too well how often a publishing house might try and hype a book into being something it was never meant to be in the first place.) Only later are we treated to the U-boats and even then McCain cheats us, skipping from a training mission straight to the second patrol. So we even aren't allowed to feel the uncertainty and experience the learning curve along with Brekendorf as he enters into his first patrol. Then the novel skips around some more and we are finally witness to a lovely rose-hued ending telegraphed right out of Hollywood.

But it's not all bad. While the writing itself isn't memorable it is at least serviceable, which is a nice change from the usual bald-faced hackery we so often see in some military fiction. And, to McCain's credit, he handles the technical, and more importantly the cultural, details very well indeed. He knows his way around a U-boat, the North Atlantic and a history book. This latter isn't meant as a slight. Quite the contrary, McCain's depth of knowledge of the cultural events that helped shape Germany's navy is one of the gems in an otherwise forgettable novel.

Two stars out of five. (And I'm being generous only because I happen to like U-boats.)

[Dowly]

Have been a slow reader on this one (currently at the second war patrol part), but yeh, I've noticed alot of similarities to Iron Coffins and Das Boot and I have to say those parts really jump out, it does lessen the reading experiment quite abit for me.