Munich by Robert Harris'Munich' is a clever combination of historical novel and spy thriller. It has something worth saying in rehabilitating, to some extent, the reputation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Criticised an appeaser, he was, in Harris' telling, simply a leader who had seen the suffering of the First World War (in which he was too old to fight) and was sincerely determined to do whatever he could to avoid another.
Harris overlays the tight timetable that preceded the Munich Agreement of 1938 with a parallel story of his own. Two student friends, one British and one German, get themselves into the negotiations between Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and the French prime minister, in order to try to persuade Chamberlain that Hitler had much larger ambitions than the Sudenland - the immediate subject of the Agreement - and was not to be trusted.
In its early part, the book neatly alternates chapters between Britain and Germany - a triumph of structure and planning, building momentum and culminating in some spectacular set pieces at the end.
I am only giving it four stars instead of five because I wanted to leave a notional star that I almost certainly would have awarded Graham Greene if he had written it.
Incidentally, the film 'Munich: the Edge of War' (2022) more than does justice to the book, with outstanding performances from Jeremy Irons and George MacKay among a uniformly impressive cast delivering an excellent script.
