Max Schaefer

I'm jumping the gun a little here but I'm going to go ahead and call this my favourite book published in 2010.

Schaefer draws his neo-Nazi characters as real and sympathetic people while at the same time never letting them off the hook for their crimes and lunatic beliefs. An easy route to go would have been to keep our sympathies with Tony by portraying him as an innocent, seduced and led astray by far right beliefs but Schaefer refuses this easy way out. Tony's racist beliefs are genuine, he knows exactly what he's getting into and he remains unrepentant to the last.
We're drawn into Tony's world and made to care about him even as we revile him because Tony is not a monster. He's a bad person, but Schaefer never allows us to lose sight of the fact that he is a person.

The dual narrative is a fantastic device here as James, in the present time-line, takes the place of the reader as he confronts the point at which interest and fascination with fascism becomes fetishisation or endorsement.… (més)

It’s hard to form a cohesive opinion on this book, even to decide whether I liked it. What cannot be denied is the depth and thoroughness of the author’s research. The reader is immersed in the world of the far right movement in the 70s, 80s and 90s, a world of skinheads and Nazi salutes, and the chapters are interspersed with copies of posters, newspaper articles and general memorabilia from those days. One of the chief characters is carrying out research into gay membership of the National Front for a possible documentary, and at times it can make for uncomfortable reading as Nazi propaganda is churned out across the page with little criticism to balance.

I enjoyed the high quality of the writing for the most part, though there were times, as the events reached the 1980s, when it began to plod, the narrative moved through an interminable cycle of bars, riots and urinals, and events were so slow I could almost believe I was reading them in real time.

The most difficult element of it for me was establishing what point the book was making. If it was to demonstrate the shifting attitudes to gay relationships over the years it succeeded. The far right stuff was a puzzle, though. Was the author, through his first-person narrator, suggesting that it was hypocritical of the National Front to demonise gays when many of its members were gay? Was he saying ‘actually you can be gay and a thug’, or complaining that gay members had to hide their sexuality and should have been able to be open about it? Whichever way I looked at it, I couldn’t imagine Nazi sympathies would be cause for any kind of pride, gay or otherwise. The character who appraises the narrator’s documentary proposal summed up some of my puzzlement : “...The politics are oddly hard to fathom. I know where you stand on neo-nazism but other people won’t. It doesn’t help that some of the nazi characters seem oddly sympathetic – not least when many of the others are, frankly, cocks.” Exactly.… (més)