The Man in the High Castle, Swastika Night, and l'Ecriture Humaine

I finished Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, which I read as a companion piece to Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, both novels imagining a future in which the Nazis have won World War II. I will briefly discuss The Man in the High Castle (Swastika Night is covered in other blog entries) and then evaluate both as l'ecriture humaine. L'ecriture humaine works from the premise that the stories we tell have implications for the lives we lead. What kind of stories are we telling as culture? Are they humane or inhumane? Do they lead us toward or away from compassion? 

L'ecriture humaine has four aspects:

1. It shines a light on personal domestic spaces, the spaces often overlooked, dismissed or derogated by the dominant discourse. These  spaces depict small scale community, class difference and sociality. They are where human relationships can be nurtured or exposed. If, as Stalin said, the death of one person is a tragedy and the death of a million a statistic, l'ecriture humaine focuses on the one person.

2. It tends toward the circular, not the linear. Life is not progress towards a defined end goal but a series of reiterative relationships, a return to the same ground in order to deepen it.  

3. It rejects degradation or humiliation of any individual or group as a rite of passage or a definition of their humanity.

4. It foregrounds empathy and compassion.

This is  always a literature of truth, not lies, of sentiment, not sentimentality,  of telling difficult stories with an ethical compass pointing at empathy, compassion and forgiveness.

A work of  l'ecriture humaine can be filled with violence, such as much holocaust literature is, but it nevertheless asserts humane values and censures degradation and horror. A l'ecriture that is not humane can, conversely, have no overt violence and can seem very beautiful and civilized while promoting an ethic of degradation and cruelty. To use the Nazi example again, as the good/evil divide is so clear there, much fascist literature uses beautiful language and description to exalt the 'Aryan' and whitewash violence and genocide as noble and pure.

Before reading The Man in the High Castle, I had watched the recent serialization of it through streaming it. It was an interesting experience to read the book after seeing the miniseries.

The series includes a compelling section not in the novel at all: it creates the story of John Smith, an all-American who throws his lot in with the Germans to become a very high-ranking and ruthless Nazi who yet loves his family. In this sub-plot he has to protect his son, who has a hereditary disease, from Nazi policy that require the adolescent boy be euthanized. The series also creates a dead sister for Juliana and makes Juliana a more central and sympathetic figure.

The book is more static and cerebral than the series, a luxury novels can afford, and focuses more intently on the Japanese occupation of the San Francisco area, Tao philosophy, and the I-Ching. Tagomi, a high ranking Japanese man, is a moral center in both the novel and the series, and in both cases, is able to cross the dimensional barrier between alternative histories, moving at times (though only once in the novel) into the world we know, in which the U.S. won the war. Spirituality and ethical living are central to Tagomi.

The bones of Dick's philosophy are buried under a plot that seems oddly peripheral to the central story, and therefore his philosophy becomes more ambiguous than in Burdekin. In a "say hello to the new boss/ same as the old boss," theme, the novel argues at the end that it doesn't make much difference who won the war while whoever is in charge oppresses those below, behaves violently, and has the nuclear capacity to destroy the earth. At the same time--and bumping up against this--is a portrayal of the Nazis as particularly evil, corrupt, stupid, and malevolent.

Burdekin makes an unequivocal case for nonviolence and woman's equality. Woman's equality is not  a subject on Dick's radar, and he shows ambivalent attitudes towards violence. Tagomi is deeply upset when he kills two Nazi agent/thugs, as killing violates his deepest moral principles. Juliana, however, almost mechanically uses a razor to cut the throat of Joe, her Nazi lover, after she discovers he plans to assassinate Hawthorne Abendsen, the "man in the high castle." (Abendsen, in Dick's novel,  wrote the alternative history novel that posits the Allies won the war.) Abendsen and his wife thank Juliana for her violent act, even though Abendsen lives unprotected and assumes he will be killed eventually.

Although all of Burdekin's central characters are men because the women have been reduced to a very low intellectual state, hers is far more the woman's novel in its sensitivity to women's plight and advocacy for appreciating the fully humanity of all people. Dick's characters are primarily men too, and they occupy a male world of business and politics. Even Childan's dinner at a Japanese couple's home is framed primarily as doing business--and Childan's interest in the Japanese wife is wholly sexual. The one female character to be fleshed out, Juliana, is exoticised and "orientalized," swinging between a surface self that is little more than a mildly sophisticated version of the "sexy, good-looking, crazy chick" and a mystical natural being with special spiritual insight. Abendsen calls her:

'a dathnon. A little chthonic spirit that ... roams tirelessly over the face of the earth.' He restored his glasses in place. 'She's doing what's instinctive to her, simply. expressing her being.'

Juliana in the novel is therefore a sex object, a crazy fucked up chick, and a mystical, spiritual, natural being--she is killer whore or redemptive goddess or nature symbol.

Burdekin's Swatiska Night works consistently in the genre of l'ecriture humaine:  the focus throughout, while espousing solidly articulated, general humane principles, is on the particular. There's no discussion of large scale military movements or battles, as in Dick's novel, which enjoys re-envisioning World War II battlegrounds.  This places Burdekin firmly in a mid-century feminist movement that included woman such as medieval and economic historian Elaine Power, and Virginia Woolf, who made it part of their politics to sideline war narratives, believing that real history lies in human community and that a constant narrative glorifying war meant ending war would be impossible.

Both Burdekin and Dick were interested in the spiritual. Burdekin ridicules Nazi spirituality but makes an impassioned defense of Quakerism--and her biography tells us she was interested in alternative religious views. Eastern religion is central to Dick.

Ultimately, both books have strongly anachronistic elements yet both make points that are, sadly, still highly relevant today.

Swastika Night, violence, Orwell, and style

I will finish Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night with one last blog that encompasses its attitude on violence, its influence on Orwell, and its writing style.

Burdekin was a pacifist until the start of World War II, when she supported the war because she thought it was vitally imperative to stop the Nazis. As her novel shows, she understood their core, and she despised it.

The novel has three main characters, all men (we remember that women have been reduced to little more than animals). First, Hermann, a typical Nazi, who is very stupid, brainwashed, and violent. Second, Alfred,  who is an English mechanic visiting Germany. He is one of the last true humans on earth, meaning he owns his own soul. Third is a Nazi Knight, von Hess, so high up in the hierarchy he can take risks. He has a special book which contains some of the true story of the earth's pre-Nazi past.  Although admirable characters in the context of the idiocy of the thousand year Reich, both Alfred and von Hess have been brainwashed into believing in woman's inferiority, and von Hess is  comfortable with casual violence, for example, wanting Alfred, while flying an airplane, to simply knock down the  people on the runway, which Alfred refuses to do.

Hermann believes in "the fundamental immutable laws of Hitler Society:"

As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman.
As a woman is above a worm,
So is a worm above a Christian.

This laughable hierarchy sanctions violence. Not much is going to happen to you (in most cases)  if you take out your aggressions on someone below you. Given that the state also valorizes and applauds violence as the chief attribute of hyper-masculinized manhood, aggressive brutality is common.

Hermann, who has a pathetic and homoerotic attraction to Alfred, is wedded to violence. In a novel in which Burdekin despises Nazism so much she makes it largely infantile and idiotic rather than frightening, she doesn't hold back from depicting graphic violence: this part of the picture is not, to her, ridiculous and needs to be shown.

Infantile Teutonic idiocy that Burdekin despised

For example Hermann gets into trouble when he comes across a fourteen year old, for whom, along with his attachment to Alfred, he has a homo-erotic desire. This boy is an:

angel-faced golden-haired chorister making a determined attempt to rape a well-grown little girl of about twelve. The child had not reached the age of submission and was therefore within her rights in putting up a sturdy resistance. And as Hermann stood for an instant, watching them rolling and tumbling, clawing, kicking and biting, he caught sight of a large red cross on the breast of the little girl’s jacket. So it was a Christian! Hermann’s whole body filled with delicious thundering warming floods of rage. He loathed the boy for being even interested in girls—with his lovely face, his ... immaturity—Hermann was physically jealous; he was shamed ... here was something at last that he could smash and tear and make bleed and utterly destroy  ...Hermann jumped at him again, and with his fists beat him into insensibility. He took special pleasure in spoiling his face. When the boy was lying unconscious at his feet he started to kick him, in the ribs, on the head, anywhere ...

The above accurately captures the Nazi mindset.

Against this, Burdekin makes a plea for non-violence. For instance, von Hess has grown up saturated in a violent culture, but he says the following to Alfred:

And warn them, warn them, Alfred, with all the soul-force you have, against violence. I don’t mean telling them just not to kick physically against the German authority, I mean warn them against accepting violence as a noble, manly thing. We Germans have done that, we have brought force to its highest power, and we have failed to make life good ...

Over and against the mindless hierarchy and cult of masculinity that sanction violence, Burdekin argues for British-style liberalism:

that very tolerance of sincerity in ideas which oneself finds loathsome shows a reserve of spiritual power which I cannot help envying for our people. In these English and Scotch heretics of all ages and in the common men who could not withhold from them all sympathy, England’s real greatness lay. If they can resist, not the physical destruction of their records, for that will be impossible, but the Germanisation of their character, and somehow, in face of all the deception they will suffer, remain themselves, there will be soul-power in Europe after the passing of this dark evil time. 

These are still words for our time.

It seems clear, as others have pointed out, that Orwell must have read and been influenced by Burdekin's novel as he wrote 1984,  which is focused on an English Everyman like Alfred who goes up agains the power of a vicious and violent totalitarian state that robs people of their humanity.  His novel also features a secret book that lays bare the underpinnings of the social order.

Of course, we read 1984 for a reason beyond polemic: it is good literature (I realize, too,  it is sexist--and ageist). In contrast, as far as the quality of writing goes, Burdekin is crude. She is far less interested in style than ideas. I went back to the novel thinking perhaps I was too harsh, perhaps it doesn't read like the draft, but then came across the first line:

THE Knight turned towards the Holy Hitler chapel which in the orientation of this church lay in the western arm of the Swastika, and with the customary loud impressive chords on the organ and a long roll on the sacred drums, the Creed began.

I stumbled over "customary loud impressive chords" but then thought, well, maybe it is not too bad. There's description and some alliteration ... it's not much worse than du Maurier's Rebecca or some of Agatha Christie's mysteries, but it has an even rawer quality, as if the novel itself were the barest skeleton on which she displayed her ideas: the characters are not fleshed out, nor is the story. It has the quality of something filmed on little more than a bare stage. For example, there are pages of sheer dialogue without one mention of someone moving a limb or even having a body. 

Nevertheless, there's also a certain crude power in her stripped-down writing: the ideas don't get buried under story, and there is little ambiguity about her point. 

I am glad I read this novel. Burdekin saw through early to the core horror of fascism--an atavastic, violent pseudo-philosophy. As Thomas Wolfe expressed in You Can't Go Home Again,  a book about his trip to Nazi Germany in 1936, these crude ideologies do not die but merely crawl into caves and crevices to await their time (Camus's observation as well in The Plague)) to reemerge. We are in that time again.  Burdekin, who speaks with incisively for woman's rights, peace, dignity. freedom of thought, and human decency, thus speaks to us today.  

Swastika Night and Women

Katherine Burdekin largely wrote fantasy or speculative fiction. She graduated from Cheltenham Ladies' College. As Martha Vicinus points out in Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, attending that particular boarding school signaled that a young woman ranked high on the class ladder. Tradesman's daughters could not get entrance, no matter how rich. Attending meant something, as going to Eton did. In Burdekin's case, her education served her--and us-- well. 

Cheltenham Ladies' College: Begun in the nineteenth century, it was built in a Gothic style.

Burdekin was highly intelligent and wished to attend Oxford, which by that point had woman's colleges, but her father would not allow it. She married, went to Australia, had  two daughters, and fairly quickly left her husband, moving back to England in 1823. She lived with her sister in Minack Head, Cornwall, until meeting and setting up housekeeping nearby with a female partner in 1926. Great credit goes to scholar Daphne Patai for unearthing Burdekin's identity and doing research on her very private life. 

Katherine Burdekin

Burdekin knew the Woolfs but was not part of their circle. Her politics and theirs, however, were similar. 

Clearly a student of Nazi rhetoric, in a literature more available in the 1930s than now, Burdekin picked up on the ridiculous romanticizing of the Nazi soldier as Teutonic Knight. She also zoomed in on Hitler's claim that his would be a thousand-year reich. In her novel, Germany has achieved partial world domination: the planet is divided between the Nazis and a far-flung Japanese Empire. All of Europe is firmly in Nazi hands.

The story begins 700 years into the thousand-year Reich. Although told from a male point of view, it soon turns to the women. In a parody of Hitler's desire to put females back in the home solely to serve as the breeders of his hyper-masculine soldier elite, Burdekin exaggerates the subjection of Nazi women. The women we encounter in Germany--and who are representative now of women across Europe--are small, ugly, stupid, degenerated, and illiterate. Their heads are shaven, and they are kept herded in barbed-wire camps, a clear allusion to the already flourishing Nazi concentration camps. Women are incessantly taught that their life's purpose is to align their wills with male wills, to obey men, and to have male babies. 

There is no rape, because rape would presuppose a woman having a mind of her own. Instead a woman who is raped must quickly understand that because a man wanted to rape her, she must have wanted the rape as well. After all, his desires are necessarily her desires. All of this is explained with dead-pan seriousness. Male babies are taken from the women at 18 months, before they can have any memories of their mothers, so that they can be brought up in a wholly masculine environment and not be polluted by exposure to the female. This is another exaggeration of Nazi policy.

Soon after the novel opens, women are herded into a Nazi "church," shaped like a swastika, for their monthly indoctrination visit. Hitler is now worshipped as a god, depicted as seven feet tall with golden hair and a golden beard. He is said to have "exploded" from the head of God the Thunderer and so never was in any way polluted by contact with a woman.

This particular edition shows Hitler reimagined as a blond Norse God. As can be seen, Burdekin published under a male pen name.

The woman cry in the church. The men think this arises from fear of being in a male domain, but as we later learn, it comes from an ancestral, barely understood mourning for all they have lost. 

Burdekin says that women are partly responsible for their fate in this new world, because for far too long they made it their goal to align with male desire.  In words that are relevant to today's world, the narrative clearly and cogently summarizes women's problems:

There are two things women have never had which men have had, of a developing and encouraging nature. One is sexual invulnerability and the other is pride in their sex, which is the humblest boy’s birthright. And yet, until they can get back those two things, which they lost when they committed their crime and accepted men’s idea of their inferiority, they can never develop their little remaining spark of self-hood and life.

Further, the text posits that what is missing from women is

 a soulpower which would come from being themselves, from being women. Men would never want to force them [rape them, if women had soulpower]. It would be unthinkable, impossible.

Burdekin is not afraid to imagine a female subjugation in which male society is entirely homosocial and homoerotic, as well as hyper-masculinized. Homosexuality is tolerated, as who can men love, respect, and think beautiful but other men? Woman are far too degraded. They are animals to rape and impregnate.

The book does not do well in terms of language respecting animals, though I can't imagine a person as humane in outlook as Burdekin meaning to denigrate or call down harm on other living creatures. However, her tendency to describe women as little less than beasts, dogs, or livestock tends to rob animals of their dignity.

In a comic touch, the women are told they have to bear more girl babies. They are not told why, but we learn it is because they have so wholly aligned themselves with male desire that they are having far too many male babies for the human race to continue. More women are needed as breeding material. However, the women are so full of self loathing that they simply decide they must have misheard the directive. 

There's little plot to spoil, but  I'd like to go back to Burdekin's analysis of the plight of women. Then in my next blog I will discuss other aspects of the novel, such as violence, its influence on 1984, and its writing style.

Burdekin's women of the Nazi future are almost comically oppressed. But how much is it exaggeration, and how much is it underlying reality, with the veil ripped off, of our times?  Three works of literature happened to run in front of me recently that illustrate Burdekin is not much exaggerating. The first is Bret Harte's "The Luck of the Roaring Camp." In this story's roaring camp, there is but one woman, Cherokee Sal, whose name suggests a mixed race. She is a prostitute who gets pregnant and gives birth to an infant boy. Of her death, we learn this:

Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame forever. I do not think that the announcement disturbed them much, except in speculation as to the fate of the child.

"The Luck of the Roaring Camp:" Who needs women when we have men? 

Getting rid of the sole woman--creating an all male environment like that of Burdekin's Nazi empire--eradicates "sin and shame forever" from this camp of vagabonds and thieves! (This eradication is supposedly of sexual sin, but read the words!) Women is the sole problem! Of course, they are not much bothered by her death: was she even human to them? But in this newly liberated all male world, the little boy can flourish from birth without the polluting influence of a woman. Women's insignificance is further emphasized by this: Stumpy and his ass, who feeds the child her milk, are all it takes to raise the child:

 “Me and that ass,” he would say, “has been father and mother to him!"

That quote is particularly striking. We may condemn Burdekin for equating her women to animals, but it is a common trope. An ass can do as well at parenting as a woman. What also strikes me is that I was read this story in elementary school (no doubt in some bowdlerized version) as an amusing piece of folktale Americana. The misogyny was completely lost on me, as on my female teacher--and so it is passed on, like a virus we can't see. (Of course, the child Luck does die--so perhaps they did need a woman?)

The second work is Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, a book my mother gave when I was 12, as she thought I would enjoy it as much as she did. Since I figured out the twist early on, I didn't, but I did imbibe another dose of misogyny, this is form of a woman abasing herself and abandoning her moral compass to wrap herself around and stand by her man. Her husband Max's confession that he is a murderer who shot his first wife, Rebecca, through the heart, does not horrify her, but brings them closer! Why? Because it means she can have his love! He really didn't love Rebecca! And not only does it occur to her that she has only his side of the story, of course told to make himself look like the victim, but she is vigorously in favor of erasing Rebecca's story and truth itself in defense of patriarchy: 

 Rebecca is dead. She can't speak, she can't bear witness.

In a morally coherent world, that might be a problem. But not here. Rebecca annoyed--dared to assert equal power to her husband as well as bodily autonomy--so she deserves to die.  Rather than be concerned that this man--monster??--she has married killed another woman for taunting him about bearing another man's child (think about that--and the murder is justified as commensurate to Rebecca's "evil!")--the new wife wants to cover up the murder:

Nobody saw you that night. You had  gone to bed. They can't prove anything. 

 This woman, as much as any abject shaven headed woman in Swastika Night, has been brainwashed to support a violent patriarchy in which a man is justified in killing an uppity woman--and as his new woman, the wife aligns herself immediately and unquestioningly to defend him, even though he is guilty. I was given this at an impressionable age as a great romance novel.

Finally, for the first time, I read a long short story by Harold Brodkey called "Innocence." A more recent work, it still illustrates the extent to which women have been deformed by a desire to please and serve men. It is told entirely from a male point of view, in first person, and is about a male, a college student, bringing a beautiful young woman to her first orgasm. She has already had sex--she is not virgin territory, but she has never enjoyed sex before. This man therefore has the opportunity to lay claim to dominance over her body by being the first to offer her true sexual satisfaction. He can master her that way. And while we might say it is thoughtful of him to be so concerned about her orgasm, it is clearly in service of his own ego needs. But that is almost beside the point. What is striking is the pathetic abjection and abasement of the woman who comes to his room. At first she says "damn" when she realizes he is naked under his sheet and wants sex, then immediately  and compliantly begins to unbutton her blouse. The narrator says:

I was amazed that she was so docile; and then I saw that is was maybe partly that she didn't want to risk saying no to me--she didn't want me to be hurt and difficult, she didn't want me to explode; she had a kind of hope of making me happy so that I'd then appreciate her and be happy with her and let her know me

Compare the above to Burdekin's quote: What men have and women lack

 is pride in their sex, which is the humblest boy’s birthright. And yet, until they can get back [what] ... they lost when they committed their crime and accepted men’s idea of their inferiority, they can never develop their little remaining spark of self-hood and life.

Burdekin exactly, in Swastika Night, exactly describes the woman Brodkey describes. As with all dystopia, we are in the present moment--or were until very recently.

 Burdekin says that to achieve equality women need to first, learn to love themselves as themselves, fully as women, not as appendages of men or as inferior men or wannabe men or men pleasers. One could argue that in our society, many women (certainly not all), are coming closer to that ideal. #Metoo showed that many women are no longer identifying with the aggressor or making excuses for predatory and unwelcome male behavior. Women are no longer keeping silent or accepting the male overwriting of our experience. This is fueling a backlash, as some men--as with Dr. Ford's allegations about Kavanaugh--take the gloves off and say they don't care. It's stunning that Republican congressmen could both say they believe Dr. Ford, and yet dismiss her testimony as not mattering when it came to a decision about a Supreme Court appointment. One wonders what will happen, as patriarchy is premised on a trade-off--women give up certain rights to men in return for protection. If men are openly abdicating on that protection, why should women relinquish power to them?

This leads to Burdekin's second point. The other attribute women have never had that men do is  "is sexual invulnerability." We are still subject to control through rape and impregnation--and in some parts of the world through genital mutilation.  Prostitution is another component of this vulnerability. Burdekin implies we can get beyond this if we develop our integrity as women. If we come across as and are fully accepted as equals, men won't think of raping and violating us. This may or may not be true, but at this time in history, it seems as if men, losing control of women as they more own their womanhood, may be doubling down on bodily control. This domination is threatened through denial of birth control and abortion laws that have far more to do with controlling women's bodies than caring for infant lives. Whether this is a rearguard action in a lost cause is yet to be seen.

And complicating all this is that in our society and the future Nazi empire, men's bodies are also vulnerable.  But more next time. 

&&&&

Physical reading experiences and Swastika Night I

A recent thread that I continue to ponder concerns reading physical books. Having been reading e-books through Kindle for more than a decade and Gutenberg on-line volumes even longer--and of course physical books for decades--I now feel able to comment on both modes, electronic and print. I will first say I greatly appreciate e-books when I am doing research: it was a huge timesaver for me to be able to cut and paste quotes for my Bonhoeffer book, and this feature continues to be a boon. I also find it a lifesaver to load books onto my i-Pad for oversea flights and adventures. Further, I don't find much difference in the actual reading of a book one way or another, though I still find it harder to "curl up" with my Kindle.

Katherine Burdekin published this under the pen name Murray Constantine. She was a very private person, like Elena Ferrante. 

Nevertheless, after ten years, I do find I prefer hard copies to e-books. I am not happy or nostalgic or sentimental about this, as life would be easier--and reading easier on our global environment for a vast number of reasons-- if I (and others) could keep our library of volumes on a space no large than one single slim hardbound book. I find, however, that physicality matters. I am always forgetting the books I have in my Kindle library. It is as if they don't exist. This can lead to  a sense of not having read them and a tendency not to return to them. I find this phenomenon perplexing but real. Further, I derive happiness from looking at my shelves of real books that an e-book to date has not been able to replicate. I recognize my personal happiness is not the most important factor in the universe, but I mention it because it is part of my relationship to books.

All of this is a roundabout way of backing into my real subject, which is Katherine Burdekin's 1937 novel Swastika Night. I will get to the matter--the thought and prose--of the book itself soon, but I  want to continue to dwell in and on reading's great surround. Recently, I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times that argued we need to take the time to read books in one sitting or in long sittings. As one who in recent years, pulled in a multitude of directions, has taken to reading books in short bits over longish periods of time, this op-ed struck a chord. The books I remember liking best, those that stick with me, I've read in big chunks, such as on a plane to England. I have come to recognize that something important is lost, no matter the book's format, in the chopped-up reading session. This factor makes group reads online a problem--a book deserves to be read--and understood--as a whole. Therefore, I pushed myself to read Swastika Night in two sittings (it is short) and am glad I did.

The novel was put out by the Left Book club in 1940, during World War II. The Left Book club also reprinted Orwell.

 I also have been thinking about book historians, those people who study the physical production and appearance of books. How a book looks matter. I was delighted, for example, to learn--an idea that must have much captured Tolkien's fancy--that William Morris in his 1896 The Well at the World's End, imagined a book that could only be read when put on a particular stone in a particular forest. I wonder, therefore, if reading Swastika Night on-line, in a version that went margin to margin and looked somewhat more typed than like a real printed book,  dampened my experience of it? Does the joy of reading the novel in a brief span of time balance the marginal quality of the format in which I read it?

 I had tried (not very actively) to read Swastika Night once before, during my Bonhoeffer research. and had utterly forgotten it existed. A talk on Woolf's Three Guineas and utopias at a recent Woolf conference reminded me of it, as it was part of the conversation (utopias inevitably lead to dystopias). I decided to force myself to plunge in a second time.

Swastika Night reminds me of Candide in being a hybrid of novelist features and polemic, and in its use of exaggeration, satire, and very dark humor, though Candide is more laugh-out-loud funny in its over-the-top hyperbole, leaving you laughing and crying at the same time at the horrors the characters undergo.  Swastika Night uses, as well, naive narrators who unthinkingly--or partially unthinkingly--accept the social order. As a disclaimer, however,  it only shares certain similarities with Candide: in many ways the two books are very different. It is also prescient in envisioning, in 1937, a world war fought and won by the Nazis. But this blog is long enough and more on the novel's content will follow in a second blog.