Book Review: The Madagaskar Plan
/The Madagaskar Plan
To reach the targets set by Wannsee, 83,500 Jews had to be shipped from Europe each month, initially men of working age – known as pioneers – to built the new towns and military bases of Madagaskar; later women, children, and the old followed. Thousands never arrived, dying of suffocation or dysentery from the bubbling toilets or simply because their spirits could no longer endure the endless plunge and roll of the voyage. Eighty kilometers from arrival, the liners stopped to disgorge their dead. A rabbi was permitted to say a few words; then the splosh – splosh – splosh of weighted bodies hitting the waves. In these stretches of water, it was rumored, the sharks were too fat to swim.
If we're charitable, we'll say that the fact of sadistic, preening Hochburg being easily the book's most complex and involving character might have been an accident on Saville's part, but however it came about, the reader will here have the unsettling reaction of being eager for the Nazi chapters. And those chapters don't disappoint: Hochburg is a coldly intelligent, gruesomely self-indulgent megalomaniac, but he's never tedious (whoever plays him in the inevitable TV series should have a whale of a time). And in the sheer morbid extent of his love for the lost Eleanor, he puts the more flinty, stereotypical pining of Burton Cole to shame. Hochburg isn't simply ruling Kongo in honor of her memory – he's systematically re-shaping the entire country as one huge tribute to her:
The whole of his Afrika Reich would be her immortalization: every stone that was laid, every garrison, town, city: the ports, the white roads cutting through the jungle, the babel of a million copper threads connecting the continent. A mausoleum of such glory that her name need never be written on it. That's why he'd been so impatient to invade Rhodesia: to consecrate more lands for her. Of course, they understood none of this in Germania. To the ministries on Wilhelmstrasse, Africa was a trove of mines and timber forests, its plantations existing solely to fill the bellies of the German hordes. But to Hochburg, Africa was a kingdom of temples.
And his memories of her aren't those of a sadistic, manipulative monster but rather, with the help of Saville's undeniable (though occasionally deep purple) way with words, those of an ardent and sensitive lover of the kind poor hapless gun-toting Burton Cole could only dream of being:
He was gliding with her in water as water as warm as amniotic fluid, below them a fathomless indigo black. A splash, a laugh … and they were lying naked next to each other in the mud, the sun filling their skin with light. He counted the freckles around her nose, which were as tiny as banana seeds. This was all he craved: this peace. If she hadn't chosen Burton. If she hadn't left Hochburg and been murdered, he would have watched the Nazis raise their edifice in Africa with indifference.
In The Madagaskar Plan, Hochburg has begun to hear rumors about a certain unbelievable-sounding doomsday bomb that the British and the allegedly-neutral Americans (under their president, Robert Taft) are developing, a bomb whose development in Nazi Germany has been halted by Adolf Hitler's distaste for the “Jewish physics” that make it work. The tense pursuit of this game-changing bomb is just one of the many sub-plots Saville expertly keeps in motion throughout this book, which for all its absurdities is almost hypnotically readable. The Madagaskar Plan will not only please fans of The Afrika Reich but will undoubtedly make many new fans – and quite a few of them will be rooting for the Nazi villain. Talk about alternate history.
