There is a moment near the end of Gomery Kimber’s ambitious and unusual novel when the arch-villain, Professor Dr Siegmund Lustgarten — SS Oberfuehrer, psychiatrist, occultist, and self-appointed candidate for apotheosis — is found burning. He has been tied to a lambing chair in a shepherd’s hut on a Greek island, the chest and torso consumed by fire, making no sound, expiring in what the novel presents, without embarrassment, as a case of spontaneous human combustion. His death coincides, to the minute, with the fatal heart attack of his pursuer, the mass-murdering thug Sepp Kahn, four kilometres away at a fort in the village below. Kahn drops dead in the courtyard just as he is about to order the massacre of a hundred civilian hostages. Both deaths, the narrative implies, are caused by the same event: Lustgarten’s last act of will, directed across the intervening distance at the man who has come to kill him.
A lesser novelist would have been embarrassed by this. The contemporary literary novel does not, as a rule, take seriously the proposition that a dying man can kill his enemy by psychic force. Kimber is not embarrassed at all. He writes with the confident matter-of-factness of someone who regards the paranormal not as a failure of Enlightenment rigour but as an insufficiently investigated category of evidence. Whether one shares this view or considers it credulous, the effect is bracing. The Nazi Alchemist belongs to a tradition — not quite thriller, not quite historical fiction, not quite esoteric literary novel — whose nearest relatives might be John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, certain of Umberto Eco’s fictions, and the occult strand of Lawrence Durrell. It is a crowded field, but Kimber has found something to say in it that is genuinely his own.
The central conceit is audacious. Lustgarten, we are asked to believe, is the hidden maker of Adolf Hitler. In October 1918, posted to a nerve clinic in western Germany, he encounters the gas-blinded Lance-Corporal Hitler in an Oudenaarde military hospital, correctly diagnoses hysterical blindness, and devises a cure that is as much occult as medical: he convinces Hitler that he is a man of divine destiny, a vessel chosen by God (or, in Lustgarten’s private cosmology, by Odin) to save Germany. The cure works. The sight returns. And over the following years, Lustgarten schools his creation in what he calls abductive logic, the Holmesian method of inferring the simplest most likely explanation from observed facts, and guides Hitler’s early political career, believing throughout that he can continue to control him through magical means: specifically, through a locket containing a lock of Hitler’s hair and a blood-written parchment expressing Lustgarten’s intent to direct the Fuehrer’s military decisions.
This is, of course, fantasy dressed in the clothes of historical fiction. Hitler’s gas blindness and the disputed question of its pathology are matters of real historical controversy; Lustgarten is entirely invented. But Kimber’s method is not that of a historical novelist who has researched the gaps and filled them plausibly. He is doing something more interested in the phenomenology of power than in its bureaucratic mechanics: asking, through the fiction, not merely how Hitler acquired his charisma and his terrible intuitive decisiveness, but what kind of mind could have recognised and cultivated those qualities in a gas-blind corporal in a military ward in 1918, and what such a mind might want in return.
What Lustgarten wants is divinity. Not metaphorically. He wants to become a god — specifically Odin, the Norse god of knowledge, whose defining feature is not omnipotence but an insatiable, self-mutilating hunger for wisdom. Kimber has clearly spent time with both the Norse mythological corpus and the tradition of European Hermeticism, and Lustgarten’s elaborated pseudo-theology is rendered with enough internal consistency to be genuinely interesting rather than merely decorative. The parallel Kimber draws between Odin’s sacrifice of an eye for cosmic knowledge and the wounds of the morphine-addicted young German garrison commander Richard von Quetzow, who has lost an eye and a leg on the Eastern Front, is quietly elegant; the observation that Lustgarten’s own partial emasculation mirrors the Odinist logic of suffering-as-initiation gives the book its most arresting psychological insight. Lustgarten is not a hypocrite who preaches transcendence while practising degradation. He has genuinely paid in the coin he demands of his myth.
The counter-narrative, the British operation designed to lure Lustgarten to the island of Panos and capture him, is constructed with pleasing ingenuity. Dr Peregrine Muir, archaeologist, Odinist expert, and the novel’s most sympathetically drawn intelligence figure, fabricates a metal scroll inscribed with runic text purportedly directing its finder to the Odin’s Text: a legendary document containing instructions for the divinisation of man. He then psychically imprints the scroll, entering a meditative state in his Piccadilly study and projecting himself twelve thousand years back to the Atlantean ceremony he is depicting, so that Lustgarten’s psychometric inspection will confirm its apparent antiquity. The audacity of this is characteristic of the novel’s tone: Muir, a trained archaeologist and a man of genuine intellectual rigour by British empirical standards, approaches the paranormal not as a believer or a sceptic but as a craftsman, deploying it instrumentally against an adversary who believes in it far more completely.
The British plan is approved by a Churchill who is amused, open-minded, and given a single wonderful line, the White House ghost story, delivered deadpan to soften the incredulity of Combined Operations, and the story then fans out into its various strands: Sir Harry Wyvern’s harrowing Wellington flight to Cairo (a set piece that earns its length through the sustained degradation it inflicts on its protagonist), the assembly of the Miracle Club of Tunbridge Wells, the strange curative performances of the enigmatic Dr Spiros on the island of Panos, and the parallel German operation in which the SS bruiser Sepp Kahn, dispatched by Hitler to recover incriminating letters and ultimately to murder Lustgarten, works his brutal way from Prague to Berlin to Athens.
These strands are handled with unequal success. The Kahn material is the novel’s most uncomfortable achievement. Kimber clearly wanted a German perspective that was neither the conventional Nazi of historical fiction nor an exculpatory exception. He has produced something queasy and in places repellent: a man who is capable of executing forty-eight Czech prisoners in a shoe factory courtyard before breakfast, who experiences the familiar murderer’s problem of diminishing returns (killing has become like cigarettes — no longer enjoyable, merely necessary), and who is portrayed throughout with a disquieting physical intimacy. We are told a great deal about Kahn’s flatulence, his dental hygiene, his hawking phlegm in the gutter, his accidental incontinence in the air crash. This is Kimber’s studied refusal of the operatic Nazi: Kahn is not Heydrich, not the blond beast of SS mythology, but a working-class sadist from a tenement, the product of a violence so normalised in his upbringing that it registered as affection. The extended Prague chapters are among the most historically grounded in the novel, and the execution scene in the shoe factory achieves something genuinely disturbing: the reader understands exactly how a bureaucracy of mass murder functions, and exactly how the people inside it permit it to function, without either the characters or the narrative supplying the usual fictional reassurances of moral clarity.
The novel’s emotional centre is an absence. Clarissa Wyvern — Sir Harry’s daughter, James Valentine’s older cousin, the woman whose murder at Lustgarten’s hands sets the entire operation in motion — appears in the text only in memory, in mediumistic séance, and in a long Munich flashback narrated from Valentine’s perspective. She is the novel’s Helen of Troy figure: beautiful, reckless, politically radical (she had been a member of the British Union of Fascists and was personally acquainted with Mosley), and sent to Germany in 1935 to gather intelligence on Hitler, using the Wyvern family name as a calling card into Nazi esoteric circles. She is strangled by Lustgarten during a sexual-alchemical ritual in which she was a knowing participant, and her body cremated privately. Kimber handles the Munich flashback with considerable skill, presenting the teenage Valentine’s infatuation with Clarissa as simultaneously real and self-deceived: he acknowledges in retrospect that she saw him as a kid brother, not a lover, that his desire for her was possessiveness masquerading as feeling, and that her murder, whatever else it was, was not a tragedy in which he himself was without agency. Valentine ends the day of Clarissa’s death by sleeping with her — she initiates it, he assents — hours before Lustgarten kills her. The sexual-alchemical dynamic Lustgarten had been cultivating in Clarissa rebounds on him; she had been taught to weaponise erotic force, and the weapon misfired. This is carefully done, and more psychologically honest about the circuits of desire and manipulation than most thriller fiction manages.
Valentine himself is the novel’s most successful original creation, and the least obviously indebted to the genre conventions the novel is simultaneously exploiting and transcending. He is a Shavian figure — he knows the plays almost by heart, models himself consciously on GBS’s method of assuming equality with those above him in rank, plans a vast critical work on Outsider figures to be called The Alienated — and Kimber gives him a quality of willed, effortful self-possession that is entirely convincing. His pre-mission punch to the soldier Sweeney’s jaw (he has never before struck an other rank, and the shock registers in his own knuckles), his decision to return the mad and burning Lustgarten rather than permit a civilian massacre, his forged Churchill letter offered to Lustgarten as bait — all of these are acts of a particular kind of intelligence, pragmatic and imaginative simultaneously. The novel is wisely unsentimental about what the capture of Lustgarten was actually supposed to achieve. Valentine, alone in the shepherd’s hut, listens to Lustgarten’s long confession about Hitler and Clarissa with the composed attention of a man who understands that the real prize — Lustgarten’s life story, his admission, his self-destruction — was always more important than anything he might have told a Cairo debriefing.
The figure of Dr Spiros deserves separate attention. He is, as any reader familiar with the subject will recognise immediately, a roman-a-clef version of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff — the Greek-Armenian teacher who established an Institute near Paris in the 1920s, travelled in central Asia at the turn of the century, and taught a System of inner development organised around the principle of waking consciousness. Kimber does not name him, but the correspondences are precise: the nationality, the shaven head, the waxed moustache, the near-fatal Caucasian shooting (Gurdjieff was shot three times), the Institute near Paris, the followers who edit his writings, the transfer of suffering as an act of will (recorded in Gurdjieff’s own writings and accounts of his circle), the tablets he administers, the teaching through shock. Whether this is an act of homage, of literary appropriation, or of genuine belief in Gurdjieff’s methods, it is hard to say. What is clear is that Spiros functions in the novel as the genuine article of which Lustgarten is the counterfeit: where Lustgarten seeks divinity through magical technique, ego inflation, and the accumulation of power over others, Spiros achieves something analogous through self-knowledge, the bearing of suffering, and absolute indifference to status. The scene in which he faces down the murderous NCO Lardner by the force of his presence alone — Lardner’s hand falling from Spiros’s arm as though he has inadvertently grabbed a field marshal — is the novel’s most quietly extraordinary passage. Kimber makes no attempt to explain it. He simply describes it.
Not everything works. The novel’s structural ambition occasionally outruns its discipline. The Miracle Club of Tunbridge Wells — Penelope Valentine and her group of ageing occultists sustaining a Cone of Enchantment directed at Lustgarten across weeks of distance — is described rather than dramatised, and this is a genuine loss. Penelope herself, briefly present in the Tunbridge Wells luncheon scene, is the most interesting unrealised character in the book: a woman who has done without servants and dispatched her own chickens and been visited by a medium through whom her murdered niece spoke in German, and who accepts all of this as one accepts the weather, neither surprised nor disquieted. Jock Muir’s assessment of the Dunkirk Cone of Power — that the Germans might not have been entirely serious about invading anyway, and that the real question is whether the Club can sustain enough psychical energy to hoodwink Lustgarten — suggests a novelistic intelligence that knows the difference between magical thinking and magical practice, but this intelligence is deployed more often in summary than in scene.
Similarly, the extended submarine sequences, while well-observed — Kimber clearly knows the atmosphere of a wartime submarine and has calibrated the class anxieties of the wardroom with precision — go on somewhat longer than the narrative energy can sustain. The episode of Private Sweeney’s misuse of the submarine’s toilet is funny, but it occupies space that might have been better given to the developing dynamic between the haunted submarine captain Petersen and the diagnostically attentive Valentine.
These are structural complaints about a novel that is, in its finest passages, remarkable. The sequence in which Lustgarten confesses to Valentine in the shepherd’s hut is among the most intellectually alive extended dialogues in recent British fiction. Lustgarten’s account of the 1918 cure — the lie he told Hitler about the permanence of his blindness, the hammer of Mimir’s Well, the candle, the phrase ‘You are God and God is Adolf Hitler’ — is both a portrait of a psychiatrist’s extraordinary technique and a study in the precise moment at which technique crosses into something that can only be called sorcery. His description of Clarissa’s death, and the years of tormenting succubus-haunting that followed, has a confessional rawness consistent with the novel’s refusal to depict Lustgarten as merely monstrous. He is genuinely brilliant, genuinely deluded, genuinely capable of love of a severely distorted kind, and genuinely terrifying. That his mental disintegration on the island is presented as both psychotic breakdown and as the approach of some actual numinous reality — the voices from the cave, the phrase about Erda and the accursed ring, the catalytic exteriorisation that splits the dining table in two — means that the reader cannot comfortably settle into a medical explanation.
There is a tradition in European literature of novels that attempt to hold simultaneously a rational and a magical world-picture: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is the obvious example, Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ another. Kimber’s ambition is in that company, though his register is more English in its restraint: he does not announce the impossibilities, he simply narrates them as fact. The burning body in the shepherd’s hut. The pendulum that begins to rotate without being set in motion. The veridical phantom of Lustgarten appearing in his Prague basement to terrify Kahn — a grey shape two metres tall that pronounces the word ‘Death’ before disappearing. In each case the effect is more unsettling than a more heavily signalled supernatural sequence would be, because the prose around them does not change register. The mundane and the uncanny occupy the same sentences.
Kimber’s prose is dense and confident and occasionally over-furnished. He writes in an idiom akin to that of Patrick O’Brian and Anthony Powell: long, subordinated sentences that accumulate clauses the way certain old houses accumulate rooms, each one slightly surprising, the whole slightly labyrinthine. There are moments when this produces brilliant effects — the description of Muir, in his Piccadilly study, relaxing into a vision of Atlantis twelve thousand years ago, the blood smell of the bull sacrifice, the horns that make the stone pavement vibrate, the High Priest raising his arms to the sun, is one of the finest pieces of sustained imaginative prose in the book — and moments when it produces sentences that need to be read twice and reward the second reading less than the first. Kimber’s dialogue is generally excellent: the Kahn-Hitler scene in the Reich Chancellery has a quality of dangerous, blackly comic intimacy that few novelists have managed in writing about Hitler, and the Wyvern-Valentine conversation in the Cairo flat crackles with the mutual wariness of two men who love and distrust each other for the same reasons.
The novel’s controlling intelligence is finally that of Jock Muir, who opens and closes the action, carries the fabricated scroll from London to Cairo, imprints it with twelve thousand years of invented memory, and supervises the debriefing of Valentine in the Citadel Hospital on the morning after Sir Harry’s death. He is the spy who is also a genuine scholar, the sceptic who is also an initiate, the hard-headed empiricist who is also, in his quiet systematic way, attempting something very like what Lustgarten is attempting — the extension of consciousness into regions that the mid-twentieth century considered inaccessible. The difference, Kimber implies, is that Muir wants knowledge where Lustgarten wants power. That Muir succeeds in fooling Lustgarten with the scroll, and that Lustgarten dies insisting the scroll is not a fake, suggests that the desire for power is in the end the obstacle to the knowledge it was supposed to secure. It is a satisfyingly ironic conclusion to a novel that has very few easy ironic conclusions.
The Nazi Alchemist is not, one should be clear, a comfortable or even wholly likeable book. It is fascinated by violence in a way that can sometimes feel voyeuristic, particularly in the Kahn sections. Its sexual politics are pre-feminist in ways that are clearly deliberate — the novel is set in 1942 and takes its period atmosphere seriously — but which occasionally produce moments where the male gaze is not quite as critically framed as the author may believe. Clarissa Wyvern, the dead woman whose murder powers the entire plot, deserves more than the role of beautiful sacrificial absence to which the novel, for all its sophistication, ultimately consigns her. And for a novel so interested in questions of consciousness, will, and the inner life, it is notably uninterested in the inner lives of women: even Penelope Valentine, the most substantive female character, is rendered almost entirely through her relationship to the men around her.
These are real limitations. But they are the limitations of a novel that is attempting something large, and the attempt is impressive. Kimber has written a book that is simultaneously a rattling good thriller — the ambush on the Panos dig is paced with expert tightness — and an exploration of the nature of charisma, the hunger for transcendence, the uses of the irrational in modern history, and the question of whether the occult is a pathology or a methodology, or both. Very few novels carry this much freight without sinking. This one does not quite sink. That it lists occasionally is not, in the circumstances, a serious reproach.
