Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.
Most modern novels seem to be written by bloody nice people who agree with each other about everything and are wondering if they should go on one of those ‘We hate the working class’ marches they have in London every month or so. They are literally bien-pensant – and hence, I would suggest, stupid. Trouble is the ‘bad’ people have been banished from fiction: we’re lucky that Henry Miller, Céline, Genet and indeed that gay-bashing, vegetarian-hating George Orwell lived before our twitchy, censorious time.
In our education system, the notion of actually knowing stuff is of no matter – in fact, it’s reactionary
Anyway, I digress. The novel in question is You Are The Führer’s Unrequited Love by the French author Jean-Nöel Orengo. It has been described in reviews as ‘unconventional’, which I think means that it isn’t about climate change. Instead, it documents the relationship between Adolf Hitler and his pet architect, Albert Speer, a relationship characterised by almost unconditional love on the Führer’s part, as well as a quasi-sexual infatuation. But the real point of it is to demarcate between hard truth and convenient lies – and wonder, with awe, at how we so much prefer the latter these days.
