Munich by Robert Harris Review

With the recent movies on Winston Churchill it’s refreshing to see someone focus instead on his overlooked predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, and his significant role in the lead-up to World War 2. In Munich, Robert Harris takes us back to 1938, the year before the war started, and the crisis in Czechoslovakia: Hitler wants to unite the German-speaking peoples in the Czech Sudetenland to the Fatherland, and will use force if he has to. Should he invade, France will be bound, by treaty, into fighting Germany, which will bring in Britain as well due to a treaty with France. Chamberlain leads the delegation for appeasement to stop the war at the Munich conference.

Having studied this period of history, the impression I’ve always had of Chamberlain was of a weak old man blinded by impractical ideals and that his strategy of appeasement gave Hitler the upper hand and almost the entire war. Harris’ portrayal is much more sympathetic and altogether positive, showing Chamberlain as a strong-willed and thoughtful leader and a skilled diplomat whose decisions instead gave Britain the time it needed to rearm properly and face down the Nazi threat when war inevitably broke out.

Harris’ characterisations are the strongest parts of this novel and we get compelling and convincing portrayals of all the major players, especially Hitler and Chamberlain’s staff. You also get a good sense of the period.

As for the actual story… not so much. Harris is hamstrung by the history he adheres to. The two main characters are fictional diplomatic counterparts who were university friends long ago, Legat the Brit and Hartmann the German, who try to get Chamberlain to stand up to Hitler by force, call his bluff, and the German army, staring both British and French armies in the face, will lead an insurrection against Hitler and thus war is avoided.

Because we know that Hitler was never deposed, Harris has to try to make the potential of that plan thrilling and he didn’t really do that. It’s questionable too whether or not such a plan would’ve worked had it been implemented in the first place. Perhaps if they’d tried it and Hitler hadn’t been toppled, Britain’s unprepared forces would’ve collapsed against the Luftwaffe and we’d all be speaking German now?

The story is actually quite thrilling here and there in the lead up to Chamberlain trying to delay Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland, prior to Munich - the problem is that the book essentially climaxes at the halfway mark! The remaining 200 pages fail to regain the momentum of the preceding 200, and, ironically, the remaining story at Munich is very dry. It’s basically stuffy men in stuffy rooms negotiating stuffy terms, and it’s very dull to read.

Munich is an informative novel but definitely not a thrilling one as advertised. The story is intermittently exciting up to the halfway mark, the characterisation is good and the writing is fine but the vast majority of it is much too boring for my taste. Robert Harris can write excellent thrillers like The Ghost and The Fear Index but Munich, like his other historical dramas, is weighed down far too much by his extensive research and dogged faithfulness to accuracy which makes for plodding, tedious reading.