The Swiss seem like such nice, friendly, polite people. Fine chocolates. Precision clocks. Sharp knives. Impeccable tidiness. Fondue. And, of course, that famous neutrality. It’s enough to think that life in Switzerland consists of afternoon yodeling in the Alps after a hard morning of cleaning house and confectioning gourmet treats. But as the recent scandal involving bank secrecy laws, the major Swiss bank UBS, and American tax evaders goes to show, you can’t always believe the shine. Or, to borrow from Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux, sometimes “clean gloves hide dirty hands.” Dealing a blow to a mostly harmless reputation and demonstrating that Americans are not the only ones whose national character rests on a certain amount of self-delusion, a commission established by the Swiss parliament in 1996 called the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland was mandated to investigate the country’s economic activity during World War II. A perusal of the report’s summary conclusions in a variety of areas reveals a country that was neutral on the surface but was profoundly linked to Germany through anti-Semitic policies sympathetic to Nazi policies as well as economic cooperation through pharmaceutical companies and banking
Without unfairly bashing the Swiss or expressing the perverse glee people sometimes feel when seeing the mighty fall, author Brian Stanford sets his novel, Somerville, in the tense disconnect between reputation and reality. Staying true to that immutable law of conspiracy thrillers, the novel begins with a suspicious death, a suicide that is most likely murder and most certainly the hook by which a young art history professor is drawn into a plot at the sinister intersection of Nazis, looted art and pharmaceutical companies.
Stanford’s background as a painter and Professor Emeritus of Art and History at Franklin College in Switzerland is a tremendous asset. Much like Stieg Larsson brings his journalist background to his Lisbeth Salander/ Karl Blomkvist novels, Stanford saturates Somerville with an academic’s attention to detail and information, doled out in measured doses of increasing potency. Unlike Larsson, however, Stanford doesn’t have a propensity for the lurid or the sensational. The peculiar result is that while the book is a riveting page-turner in terms of its unsettling concepts and ideas as explored by a likeable protagonist, the plot never achieves the gravitational menace and paranoia of a Larsson or Robert Ludlum novel. Half the book, indeed, consists of reading a report, while the rest of it amounts to puzzle pieces falling properly into place with only a few hiccups along the way. Certainly, one of these hiccups involves another essential thriller ingredient, an assassination attempt on the hero, but as with everything else in the book’s second-half resolution, Stanford deals with it too neatly to meaningfully fray the nerves.
Despite the novel’s lack of immediate urgency, the result of not fully capitalizing on the drama inherent in the book’s concept and themes, Somerville is a solid debut novel that is informative without being dry or preachy. Stanford trusts in his readers’ intelligence and capacity to pay attention, and in this sense the lack of cheap gimmicks has its benefits. Hopefully, we will see more of the good professor’s erudition in future novels.
Somerville, by Brian Stanford. Available through major bookstores and iUniverse. (http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/)
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