This is the second novel by Robert Barnard I've read this year -- the first was Out of the Blackout, which I thought I'd reviewed on here but it seems I didn't, oddly, as I enjoyed it a lot. I liked this one too. I knew nothing of Robert Barnard before, which is kind of surprising as he seems to be an extraordinarily prolific author, mainly of detective fiction. In fact the two I've read so far do not fit into that category, though both deal with mysteries and the solving of them. Both, too, centre on children separated from their parents and on the search for identity, and in both WW2 is central to the plot. In Out of the Blackout a small boy arrives in Devon with a trainload of evacuees, but his name proves not to be on the list and nobody has any idea who he is. He is luckily adopted by a loving family and, as an adult, sets out to search for his birth parents.
This one also starts in wartime, or rather just before the start of the war. In the prologue, a couple of small German-Jewish children are sent to London on a train which, we discover much later, was actually the last of the kindertransport trains to get out of Germany. When the novel proper begins, the relevance of this is not immediately apparent, as we are plunged into the story of Kit Phillipson, a young man from Glasgow, who turns up in Leeds in search of his birth mother. Although he is welcomed by her with open arms, the rest of the family is less enthusiastic and his father, now in a retirement home, is downright unpleasant.
The mystery here, then, is not the identity of his birth parents, who Kit has found without difficulty, but the manner of his separation from them. For Kit was abducted from a family holiday in Sicily at the age of three, and placed with a family in Glasgow with whom he had a very happy and stimulating life until both parents died relatively young. Now it transpires that Kit's adoptive father was the younger child on the kindertransport train. Kit is deeply puzzled by the whole situation, as his adoptive parents -- an academic and a newspaper editor -- appear to be the most unlikely people to connive at an abduction. His enquiries lead him in ever widening circles, through London to Vienna and finally to Italy. In the process he uncovers a great deal of information about life under the Nazi regime in Germany and the conduct of the Mafia in Sicily and beyond.
This is a highly readable novel, and raises some really interesting issues. Essentially I would say it confronts that age-old problem of nature vs nurture. Although Kit's birth mother seems to be warm and welcoming, he finds himself increasingly interested in, drawn to and identified with the couple who took him in and made him their own. Barnard is clearly a serious historical researcher and on the evidence of these two books he has a particular interest in WW2 and in fascism in all its guises. So, all in all this makes for an intelligent, informative and entertaining novel.
