The rave review must have delighted the author, but I wonder how readers felt after finishing the book. The New York Times calls Italian writer Giaime Alonge’s new novel, The Feeling of Iron, “stunning” and his prose “as cinematic as the finest classic thrillers.” ^[1]

For me, the praise wasn’t the draw. Instead, I picked up Alonge’s novel after reading that one of its two converging story lines takes place in Central America in 1982. Half the action occurs in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, but it’s intercut with a story partly set among the Contra guerrillas, a ragtag CIA-backed army that struggled to topple the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

My husband was kidnapped by ex-Contra guerrillas while riding a small riverboat to Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast in 1988. Paul was the Latin America correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, and heading to the coastal town of Bluefields to do a story. 

An ex-Contra in a tattered uniform fired shots across the bow, forcing the boat to shore. Afterward, the uniform and his subordinate marched my husband and the other passengers into the jungle at gunpoint, tied them up and warned that they’d be back with their gente, the other members of their unit.

Not many novels feature the Contras, certainly not 442-page doorstoppers. Italian doorstoppers: Alonge wrote the book in his native Italian, and it was translated into English by Clarissa Botsford. 

I was curious enough to order book and read it through, slowly growing incredulous.

An Alternative Review

The Feeling of Iron is a convoluted novel, but I’ll try to simplify by saying that the Second World War story revolves around high-level Nazis and their victims. Alonge puts us in the room in Berlin when Hitler’s deputy Adolf Eichmann first tells fascist bureaucrats about the planned murder of Europe’s Jews—the Final Solution; the Holocaust. 

In a barrage of short chapters, we meet a great many characters in a great many locations, among them the Dachau concentration camp, Lodz, and a nobleman’s castle in what is now Poland. Along the way, Alonge explores what the Times reviewer calls the novel’s central theme: “Vengeance, its enduring allure and equally enduring futility.”

His heroes are two Jewish men struggling to survive the war: a left-wing Czech doctor named Anton Epstein and a tough Polish worker, Shlomo Libowitz. The main villain is an urbane but evil Nazi scientist, Major Hans Lichtblau, who conducts experiments with mind-altering drugs in a castle in what was then East Prussia, torturing and murdering Jews while using both Epstein and Libowitz as slave labour.

Lichtblau flees Europe ahead of the victorious Allies and re-emerges at the centre of the 1982 story line, when he lives in Honduras under the name Victor Huberman. In an intercut barrage of equally-short chapters, we learn that Anton Epstein and Shlomo Libowitz are working together to track him down. 

They’re part of a joint effort by the Soviet KGB—which has brought Epstein on board—and a nebulous group of rich Western Jews who employ Libowitz as a part-time Nazi hunter. Now an Israeli citizen, Libowitz alternates his work as an assassin with running a coffee bar.

Obviously, the chapters picturing the Holocaust are upsetting. But the only thing that, quote, stunned me about the book is how bad it is.

That’s particularly true of the ending, when I laughed out loud at the ludicrous death of the unrepentant Lichtblau, by time time a Contra-backing, pony-tailed hippie-ish drug-trafficker based in his private fortress in Honduras. 

Libowitz and Epstein corner him there, aided by a corps of Sandinista soldiers commanded by an Eton-educated Englishman named Peter Jennings. (Yes, really.)

A gunfight erupts between the Sandinistas and Lichtblau’s private army of Indigenous people, portrayed by Alonge as lacking both intelligence and volition. As they battle, Lichtblau escapes into the jungle, heading for the retreat of a shaman, a man he calls a savage. 

Destination in sight, Lichtblau falls into a pool of quicksand he doesn’t seem to have noticed on previous visits to the shaman, with whom he does drugs. When Shlomo Libowitz arrives, he finds the Nazi trapped up to this waist, apparently unaware there are ways to get free of quicksand.^[2] Shlomo decides not to shoot, and instead smokes a fine Cuban cigar while enjoying the sight of the Nazi going under.

“His body was sucked to the bottom of that foul-smelling pool,” Alonge writes, “and his spirit perished along with the flesh.”

The New York Times praised this. Why? ^[3]

Yet a bad book can raise interesting questions, and I’m left with a large one about Alonge’s depiction of evil. He ignores Hannah Arendt’s hint that evil can be banal—as my husband found in his meeting with the ex-Contras. It’s an odd thing to consider, but the novel made me wonder whether a lack of everyday banality can make a book fail.

Mexico City, 1988

When I picked up the phone, I was surprised to find the Globe’s foreign editor on the line from Toronto. We were living in Mexico City while Paul travelled throughout Latin America. It was early evening, and I was at home with our son while Paul was in Nicaragua. I had no idea why Gene was calling.

“Lesley, I want you to know that Paul is fine,” he said. “There’s no problem. I just spoke with him. He’s okay.”

“Yes?”

“Really. He’s completely uninjured.” Then in a rush: “He was kidnapped by the Contras but he managed to escape.”

When he got home, Paul told me about the riverboat, the shots fired, how they were forced to shore. About the ex-Contras marching them at gunpoint away from the river. Ex-Contras, because by then, the guerrillas had been defeated, although freelance units still roamed the countryside creating havoc when they could.

These ones might have been remained in the fight, or they might have become freelance thieves. The one with the gun kept his face covered, so Paul thought of him as Mask. He learned the other—barefoot and in rags—was named Cirilo.

Paul was with six other people on the outboard: the pilot, two men and two women, one with a baby. The ex-Contras marched them into a clearing and tied them up. One of the women pleaded to be allowed to continue her journey, saying that her daughter was waiting. Mask was unmoved, replying that he had a daughter too, and no prospect of seeing her.

All of this could be written as high drama, cinematic, cue the foreboding music. But there was enormous banality threaded through the fear. The guerrillas had no rope to tie up their captives, so they forced people wearing shoes to unlace them, and used the laces to tie their hands behind their backs.

Afterward, they robbed everyone of whatever money and valuables they had. Cirilo took off his shirt and held it out, forcing them to throw their wallets and jewelry into his makeshift sack. Paul had hidden his wedding ring in his shoulder bag, but they took the bag. He’d also shoved $150 U.S. cash down his pants, which was probably the most money anyone there had. In this case, the guerrilleros didn’t find it.

After threatening to return with accomplices, the ex-Contras separated the women from the men, then disappeared. As soon as the men were sure the bandits were gone, they untied each other’s shoelaces and melted into the jungle.

Paul thought his chances were better without the others, at least one of whom was a former Sandinista soldier. He wished them luck and struck out on his own. Using the skills he’d learned while camping in Ontario, he found a stream and followed it back to the river, where he soon found himself in the middle of a plantain grove.

Paul didn’t want to drink the water, having picked up hepatitis in rural Nicaragua once before. He was also hungry, not having eaten for 12 hours. Unfortunately, he found the plantains were inedible, so he had to turn to the coconuts scattered on the ground. Picking up a rock, he tried to crack one open.

A local small farmer, a campesino, heard Paul’s efforts. The man motored across the river and took Paul to his house. He gave him fresh coconut water while his wife kindly prepared a chicken dinner. Shortly afterward, a large government patrol boat appeared on the river. The Sandinistas took Paul on board and later transferred him to a smaller vessel. It took him to Bluefields, the town on the coast.

Paul found a room in a one-star hotel, but he got little sleep. The police came knocking at 2 a.m. and took him to the station. The barefoot kidnapper, Cirilo, was brought in for Paul to ID. “Tell them I treated you well,” he shouted at Paul. Afterward, he turned to a policemen and called him “guy,” which earned him a whack on the shoulder.

The next day, Paul filed a story about what had happened. This tied up the one international phone line in town for long enough that a white-haired Moravian missionary glowered at him as he left the booth. “You are a horrible person,” she said.

He soon learned, to his relief, that all the riverboat passengers were safe, some of them having made it to Managua. Meanwhile he met an English couple arriving back from their honeymoon in the nearby Corn Islands. Now the $150 Paul had shoved down his pants came in handy. He and the newlyweds pooled their cash and chartered an old DC3 to fly back to Managua. Afterward he flew home to Mexico City.

Which brings me back to The Feeling of Iron

In Alonge’s novel, no shoelaces are deployed, all victims are heroic, every Nazi remains unrepentant, and whenever anyone fires a gun, he hits his target in the head and kills him instantly.

I lie. When a heroic character and his horse are shot, the man lives for long enough to put the horse out of its misery, then dies a speedy and painless death.

This makes the novel feel like a videogame crossed with an action movie—not that there’s a firm boundary between the two anymore. Alonge is a screenwriter, and maybe that explains his approach to both character and action. 

I’m a screenwriter myself as well as a novelist, and have worked on two or three videogame adaptations. One of them was a big Hollywood script doctoring job. It wasn’t a good movie but it paid for a reno on our house. I also liked the director, so overall, I was happy to get the gig. But I never confused doctoring a screenplay with writing a novel, certainly not one with literary aspirations, and I’m afraid Alonge has.

Having said all that, I realize that I might be the wrong audience for the book. In The Globe and Mail, journalist Ian Brown recently reviewed a novel called The Book of I by Scottish writer David Greig, also a screenwriter. The novel opens with a Viking raid on the Scottish island of Iona in 855 A.D., another historical event. 

Brown calls it a romantasy for men, and suggests that this might be a rising new genre. It features violence, war, more violence, sex, a sense of humour, a rueful but admirable hero, a love story and violence. Also sex. Writes Brown, “There’s a famous joke among publishers. The most popular straight men’s magazine ever published would be called Tits and Hitler.”

Maybe men will like Alonge’s The Feeling of Iron, which is loaded with violence, war and Hitler. But it lacks everyday banality and a sense of humour, and there’s little sex.

So maybe not.

An afterword

I’ve decided to try an experiment. People don’t seem to like hyperlinks within a text, so this week I’m doing endnotes. If you want more information on some of the subjects I’ve mentioned, the links are below.

And please tell me if this format works for you.

__________________________________

^[1] You can read the Times review of Alonge’s novel here.

^[2] In case you’re stuck in quicksand while trying to escape to the protection of a shaman, click here and learn various ways to get free.

^[3] The critic Jan Harayda has a lot to say about what she calls the dumbing down of the New York Times Revew of Books. Harayda writes a wonderful Substack newsletter called Jansplaining. You can find one of her Times takedowns here. Headline? “Has the New York Times Book Review finally hit rock bottom?”

Has it? What do you think?