OPINION:
ALPHABET HOUSE
By Jussi Adler-Olsen
Dutton, $27.95, 480 pages
There is nothing about this gripping book that isn’t chilling to the point of being terrifying.
It is the harrowing story of a German wartime hospital ward full of patients who may or may not be insane or who are simulating derangement to protect themselves from the sadistic Nazis who surround them. And their simulation, real or not, is no shield against repeated torture and even execution if it’s decided by their predators that it isn’t worth keeping them alive. Their nightmare is interrupted only by the sound of bombs falling as Allied planes strafe Germany in the final years of World War II.
Jussi Adler-Olsen, a Danish crime writer who is the son of a psychiatrist, drew heavily on what he learned with his father during work in a mental ward, and his memory is impressive. He insists this is not a book about World War II, but it most certainly is. It is the story of two British pilots who crash-land while flying a reconnaissance mission over Germany and save themselves with uniforms stolen from two dead SS officers in a troop train. With other wounded Germans they are taken to a mental hospital known as the Alphabet House and what they learn is that they have descended into hell. Patients are subjected to torture, shock treatments and overdoses of narcotics to determine whether they are faking insanity to avoid being sent back to active duty on the dreaded Russian front.
The two British pilots have saved themselves for something worse. Of course, they must not speak, and they cannot speak German so they literally must suffer in silence. It turns out that Bryan unknowingly is impersonating a high-ranking SS officer with a reputation for violence and contacts in high places in the Third Reich. Consequently, he receives slightly better treatment than James, who retreats into a stupor of silence to avoid his misery. Bryan remains obsessed with the idea of escape, but James is too damaged psychologically and mentally and, of course, can have no verbal contact with Bryan, let alone understand the conspiracy going on among their fellow inmates and some of the nurses.
It takes 200 pages of mounting horror before Bryan makes a desperate and daring escape, battling one of his torturers as he does so, but he cannot take the semi-conscious James with him. At this point, the plot leaps to 1972 and Bryan is now a wealthy doctor in England who is still haunted by the memory of James and his guilt over the fact that his friend was never found, alive or dead. Bryan returns for the first time since the war to Germany in an obsessive search for his friend. He is, of course, unaware that three of the Nazi monsters from Alphabet House have survived in postwar Germany, prospering and keeping what remains of James as their creature to be brutalized.
The second part of the book is almost as grim as what precedes it. Bryan becomes the target of the postwar Nazis who still believe he is the brutal SS officer who escaped and of whom they remain afraid because of his reputation for brutality and the possibility he may strip them of their stolen money. At this point it strains credibility that James comes back to life without regaining all of his memory or most of his mind. He is obsessed by revenge which is understandable because what he does remember is the constant pain. He is determined to inflict similar suffering on his captors and has learned the ways of the brute.
Yet the James who was a pilot during the war in many respects is dead, and what he has learned about human capacity for cruelty does not restore him to what he once was. The denouement of the book is as violent as its beginning, and Bryan realizes to his dismay that the James he wanted so badly to save no longer exists.
Mr. Adler-Olsen has written a riveting book that is steeped in the kind of hopelessness that comes close to destroying his characters. The saddest point he makes is of the destruction of a friendship. Ultimately, Bryan gives up on James, yet he can never forgive himself for the fact that he can never recover the friendship that lasted for so many years. James himself is irretrievably lost, forever seeking memories that he once cherished.
• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.