Munich by Robert Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Munich is another historical thriller from Robert Harris. The setting is the Munich Conference of 1938 at which Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom agreed that Czechoslovakia must give up the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. It’s an important event in the build up towards World War 2, but it’s also something that is fairly well known, and I was curious as to how the author would approach it, and what kind of story he could create with this setting.

The first part of the book a little slow, but we meet two diplomats, one British and one German, who were friends at Oxford. We follow their stories in parallel as the crisis unfolds and eventually they meet again in Munich where each is a junior staff member of his respective delegation. There’s not much more that I can say without getting into spoilers.

The author has used some of the more recent historical research on Prime Minister Chamberlin. It’s always been easy, in retrospect, to condemn his policy of appeasement, but could Great Britain have gone to war in 1938 over the Sudetenland and been victorious? It’s not a simple question.

The Oster resistance group is also part of the novel. There was a plot among some officers in the German Army to arrest and depose Hitler if he tried to invade Czechoslovakia. How realistic this conspiracy was, and it’s actual chance of success are both debatable.

So with the constraints of history, he doesn’t really have a lot of room to maneuver, I think Mr. Harris has done a good job of story telling. I found the book to be a good read; yes it is a little slow in the first part of the book, but the twists and turns in the stories of the two protagonists kept me interested until the end. I recommend this book.