Book 3

Six years ago today I started this blog – so it seems an apt moment to end it. No, not end... the better way to put it is: take a break. I can’t believe everything that has happened in those years. I’ve published two novels; had a slew of reviews from some of the most prestigious publications in the world; appeared on radio and TV; been on foreign book tours; travelled to three continents on research trips; had the pleasure of meeting my readers. For someone who always dreamed of being a writer, it is the dream come true.

And now it’s time for a hiatus. I’m currently working on a new novel and want to concentrate all my efforts on that. This new project is not an Afrika book; I need a break from Nazis! That said, I do intend to finish my trilogy, and with that in mind I thought I’d say a few words about BOOK 3 as I head off.

Although The Madagaskar Plan is a standalone book, if you’ve read it you will know that several narrative strands have yet to conclude and that the fates of the characters remain unresolved.

I often mention the psychedelic version of The Afrika Reich, the version that was never published. Putting aside the issue of its surreal, acid-trip aesthetic, another reason publishers didn’t like it was because it was too long, coming in at 250 000+ words. When I re-imagined this version as a thriller I divided the original into three parts: the first set in Congo, the second in Madagascar. The final segment was set around the death camps of the Sahara. This is the basis for Book 3. I plotted it out in 2007 and in the decade since have been mulling it over in my mind. It is an extraordinary odyssey through the deserts of North Africa during the dying days of Nazi rule. I hope it will be a fitting end to Burton’s and Hochburg’s story.

I’ll add more details and information about Book 3 as and when I have them, including a likely publication date. In the meantime why not check out the AFRIKA 3 page on my website. There you’ll find a brief outline of the plot as well as a chance for you to decide what the final book in the AFRIKA REICH TRILOGY will be called.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed the A to Z of The Afrika Reich and The Madagaskar Plan. I hope you enjoyed the books. If you did, please do encourage your friends to buy them; leave a review on Amazon/Goodreads; and generally help spread the word. Every copy of Books 1 & 2 sold, brings 3 closer to publication. I can’t wait to tell you how it all ends...

PS – although I won’t be adding any more entries to this blog for the foreseeable future, I will be monitoring it. So do keep your comments coming.

L is for LETTER

In the final stages of writing The Madagaskar Plan several issues became evident. The first was that I was running out of time. The book had originally been scheduled for a February 2012 publication date. This soon became 2013. Eventually I committed to summer 2015 even as I was struggling to finish it. (This meant delivering the manuscript by October 2014.) The second problem was word length. I was contracted to write a book between 110-120 000 words. It soon obvious that Madagaskar would be longer. I was asked not to exceed 150 000, the point at which production costs escalate sharply. By the summer of 2014 I had broken the 170 000 mark!

Issue number three came when my UK editor read the manuscript for the first time. He was concerned it wasn’t sufficiently stand-alone. He felt it referred back to The Afrika Reich too much and that this would deter new readers. Given the gap between Books 1 and 2, he was also concerned that readers of the original wouldn’t remember what had happened. As he said, ‘it’s fine if [readers] finish the first book and immediately start the second... but you can’t assume that will be the case.’ After pondering this advice I thought it made good commercial sense, so I removed many of the references to Afrika Reich e.g. mentions of Dolan and Ackerman.

All of which leads to the most substantial cut I made from Madagaskar.

There are two versions of The Madagaskar Plan. The one that was published, which you hopefully bought and read; and what I call the ‘trilogy edition’.

The major strand I cut was intended to link all three books of the trilogy. It begins in Chapter 6, when Burton’s aunt gives him a bundle of letters. They are from Eleanor, Burton’s mother. Although she never actually appears in the books, she is one of its most significant presences and I wanted her to have an opportunity to speak in her own voice – like Ma Bundren does in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In the LETTER there is a mind-blowing revelation about Hochburg, something now completely cut from the published version of the book (though I wrote his character with it in mind). This revelation was to have resonance in Madagaskar but much more significance in Book 3, leading to yet another shock... so I’m going to have to find an ingenious way to shoe it into the third book.

In a final ironic twist, Burton never actually reads the letters. Instead their contents are read by Kepplar. This happens approximately half way through Madagaskar, which means halfway through the entire trilogy and in many ways is the scene upon which the trilogy pivots, so it was a shame to cut it. I won’t reveal the contents of the letter but here is the original, deleted passage that leads up to it. [Spoiler alert.] It comes as Kepplar is searching Burton’s room in Roscherhafen:

"In the bedside cabinet [Kepplar] discovered an American passport and a bundle of letters liver-spotted with age. He flicked through them. They were the tawdry outpourings of an unknown female, the type of nonsense his wife would have indulged in if he hadn’t forbidden her; they offered no clue as to where Cole might go next. He was about to discard them when a word caught his eye.

Walter.

He read more closely and saw it appear again, then with increasing frequency.

Kepplar returned to the top letter and worked methodically through them. He had finished a dozen pages before he came across the first reference to Walter Hochburg, son of a missionary family. He knew nothing about his former master’s past: the revelation caused his stomach to flutter, Hochburg despised the church. Yet a man was not his parents. Kepplar’s father had died of septicaemia during the Great War, he barely remembered him; his mother had called him a traitor to everything decent for joining the Party. A paragraph later there was a description of Hochburg with his ‘cascade of raven-black locks’. That made Kepplar simper; soon his lips were narrow. He read till it grew too dark, flicked on the overhead light, paced the narrow room undecided whether he could bear to know more. His skin felt dank, like he wanted to shed it.

Eventually, he sat and continued until the final letter. It was dated [month], 1930, Lomé, in what had been British Togoland. When he finished, he twisted the lobe of his missing ear until it stung. He read the letter a second time and wished there were some matches in his pocket.

Kepplar pushed back his seat, the sound scraping through him, and walked to the balcony: he needed to taste air. Floodlights cast the beach in a harsh monochrome, a few couples walked along the sand. He stood watching the breakers until far across the ocean the clouds flared for an instant. Kepplar counted the seconds that followed, the way he used to as a boy, waiting for the thunder.

Silence was his only reply."

The next chapter was to be the letter itself. Three thousand words of ‘confession’ from Eleanor. Having read it, Kepplar’s attitude towards Hochburg shifts. Later Hochburg takes possession of the letters. The reader would know what was written in them but the person they most affect – Burton – would remain ignorant of their contents.

All the sections surrounding the letter were written up to the fifth draft (of six) of the book. I had a good working version of the letter itself... but never finished it to a level I was pleased with. But by now time was against me. Add the standalone issue and the need to trim the word count and it seemed the most obvious strand to remove from the book. In a single chop, it reduced the length by 15 000 words. The only trace of the letter that remains is the epigraph to Part I.

Of course now I have two different versions of the book on different trajectories. The overall arc of the trilogy remains the same, but without Eleanor’s letter, the journey there will be different. The published version of Madagaskar is 157 000 words, the ‘trilogy edition’ 172 000. Whether it will ever see the light of day, I don’t know. Because of the licensing agreements with my publishers I can’t publish it separately, so it may have to wait like some ‘director’s cut’ to be released in the future. Or possibly the extant text will become the one everyone is so familiar with that it will no longer be necessary. We’ll have to see. And first I have to finish the trilogy and write Book 3. Which leads me on to my final blog of this A to Z...

L is also for LOST EYE

[Spoiler alert.] On the subject of Book 3, I should also say a word about Hochburg and his LOST EYE. It is a reference to Norse mythology and Wotan, leader of the Gods. Wotan sacrifices an eye to gain knowledge of the future and in doing so foresees the end of the world. Which may / may not tell you something about where Walter Hochburg is headed...

T is for TANA

Standing where Hochburg stands

TANA – or to give it its full name Antananarivo (literally: the city of a thousand warriors) – is the capital of Madagascar. It’s a long journey there: London to Paris for the connecting flight, then eleven hours down and across Africa to the Indian Ocean and southern hemisphere. Arriving was not for the faint-hearted. The plane landed at what looked like an abandoned airport. Along with four hundred fellow passengers I had to hurry across the tarmac into a suffocatingly humid arrivals hall. There were no queues, just an interminable scrum to get through. Immigration documents had to be filled out by hand, in triplicate, and presented to two different desks in order to get my passport stamped. The diary I kept while travelling simply reads, ‘ABSOLUTE CHAOS’. However, no matter how wearing it was (the heat, the press of bodies, screaming babies, an hour to get to the front), it occurred to me that it would have been nothing compared to the bedlam millions of Jews would have faced arriving in Nazi Madagaskar.

Next morning I began my exploration of Tana proper. I was staying in the suburbs and to get to the centre had to drive past shanty towns and brick factories, paddy fields, and canal banks with literally miles of washing laid out to dry on them. Tana reminded me of many big Africa cities: overcrowded, chaotic and slightly shabby, a bricolage of colonial architecture and more recent concrete blocks. It was also full of colour and a vibrancy that cities in the developed world just don’t possess. The lower town is truly labyrinthine, navigation around it made all the harder by the fact many streets don’t have names or that the names change regularly depending on which dictator is in power.

My most vivid memory is the main marketplace, especially the butchers where sausages and great racks of zebu rib (the local cattle) hung beneath red canopies, dripping blood and buzzing with flies. There was no sign of any refrigeration. I’ll leave the smell to your imagination.

Tana is built on a twelve hills, the highest of which is crowned with Queen Ranavalona I’s palace. Erected in the mid-19th century, it was destroyed by fire in 1995, leaving just the stone shell and has been in a state of permanent renovation since. From here I had a spectacular view across the plains as they shimmered in a heat haze. A warm breezed licked my face... just the way it does when Hochburg stands in the same spot in Chapter 16. The palace was the model for Globus’s headquarters in the book, not least because its rocky foundations are steeped in blood. Ranavalona, known as ‘the wicked queen’, was notorious for hurling those who displeased her off the walls of her palace. It seemed an appropriate base for the SS.

T is also for TAFT

[Spoiler alert.] One of the arcs that runs through the trilogy is America’s involvement in Africa: from disengagement in Afrika Reich through to being a full player in Book 3. America’s role in the world order is a key part of the plot in Madagaskar. For this I needed a president who was isolationist but not slavish so, as well as one with an ambiguous attitude to the fate of the Jews. At first I thought of making up a character, but given that most of the historical figures in the book are real, I felt obliged to do the same with my president. So I started scouring all presidential candidates and hopefuls of the 1940s and early 50s.

The biggest difficulty with this was how real history affected my choices. For example, Eisenhower became president partly on a war-hero ticket; other candidates were popular because they were tough on Communism, a stance that makes little sense in my world. I therefore had to disentangle these elements from my selection. Luckily, one figure soon came to the fore: Robert A. TAFT, a senator from Ohio and son of William Taft, the 27^th President.

Taft had narrowly missed securing the Republican Party’s nomination for president against Eisenhower in 1952, so was a highly credible possibility given my altered timeline. Taft had another advantage. He died in July 1953 – i.e. three months after the events of Madagaskar – so if the narrative for Book 3 changes I have an excuse to ditch him!

Z is for ZELMAN

ZELMAN is one of the new characters in the book and has replaced Kepplar as Hochburg’s deputy in Kongo. Although he only appears in a couple of chapters he will take on a more significant role in Book 3. His name comes from the psychedelic, original version of Afrika Reich, where he was an engineer building an opera house in the jungle, a character constantly goaded by Uhrig (remember him?). As I’ve written before I’m quite happy to recycle names from unpublished projects.

In fact The Madagaskar Plan is populated with unused characters. In the first version of Afrika Reich there was also a sardonic mercenary called Tünscher. And Jared Cranley comes from an unpublished pirate novel I wrote called An Oyster for the Devil (I always liked that title).

The issue of names is fitting for Madagaskar because one of its motifs is names and how we use them. Throughout the book names are either avoided, or changed, or morphed, or used for dramatic effect. This was not a conscious choice, rather something that crept into the text and I became aware of at a later stage. Once aware of it, I emphasised it more. Names are essential to our own identity but we rarely consider them so, perhaps because they’re as familiar, as taken-for-granted, as limbs. I always wonder, for example, whether Sting’s closest friends, call him Sting or Gordon (his real name). Similarly with Michael Caine / Maurice Micklewhite. Did anyone dare call John Wayne Marion Morrison?

This is salient to my world because the original surname of the Hitler family was Schickelgruber; Hitler’s father changed it in 1876 (thirteen years before his son was born). This may have been the most devastating name change in history. Some historians believe Hitler could never have risen to power with the name Schickelgruber. The massed ranks of Nazis shouting ‘Heil Schickelgruber!’ certainly has a comic ring, and comedy never led to war or death camps.

Elsewhere no name in the book was chosen at random. Mrs Anderson, Pebble, Dr Pavel, to mention a few, are all references. I’ll leave it to you to discover their origins...

B is for BUTTERSCOTCH

Much is made of the ‘Point of Divergence’ (PoD) in alternative history: the moment where real events end, and imaginary ones begin. Indeed I’ve written about the subject before (see previous blogs). Most people view the PoD of my world as the British defeat at Dunkirk. However, as previously stated I don’t view Dunkirk as the moment history takes a different path; I see it merely as the symptom of a much earlier change. The true deviation is more subtle and comes before the Nazis have taken power.

Some people have asked whether the PoD is the beach burning scene in the first book... those readers are on to something. But to get to the bifurcation you have to go back even further. In The Madagaskar Plan, the true Point of Divergence is revealed for the first time. It is Hochburg’s use of the word ‘BUTTERSCOTCH’ to describe the skin above Eleanor’s heel. I like the idea of how the course of the 20^th Century might turn on a single, illicit adjective. It strikes me as a more intriguing idea than whether a battle was won or lost.

The point I’m trying to make is that history is not decided by headline events, men of destiny or the fate of armies – but in the obscure moments of our personal psychology. We make seemingly unimportant choices and these ripple through time in ways we can never imagine, informing much later decisions that can have profound effects on the world.

The misuse of the word ‘butterscotch’ leads to a multitude of other events and in the prologue of Book 3 you will see the full geopolitical implications of it (which admittedly tie back to Dunkirk). All this grows from that one misplaced word. History pivots on the trivial, the insignificant, as all our lives do. Though I should add, you don’t have to read the book in this way. If you’d prefer to keep Dunkirk as your PoD, that is your privilege as a reader!

B is also for BAYERWEED

One of the main new characters in Madagaskar is Tünscher, an old friend of Burton’s from the Foreign Legion and now an Obersturmführer in the SS. He’s meant as a trickster figure, someone neither the reader, nor Burton, knows whether to trust completely. [Spoiler alert.] To add an extra piquancy to this, and make him more unpredictable, I gave him a drug habit. Tünscher is a user of BAYERWEEDS.

During my research I read how Germans on the Eastern Front were prescribed cigarettes laced with heroin for lung injuries, and how some soldiers started smoking them to counteract the freezing air of the Russian winter.  A trade in these cigarettes soon began and it seemed a likely thing for Tünscher to get involved with. I coined the slang term ‘Bayerweed’ from the German pharmaceutical company that first developed heroin. Its name: Bayer AG.

O is for ORIGINS

I’ve written before how The Afrika Reich came about (see A is for Apocalypse Now) but what were the ORIGINS of The Madagaskar Plan?

The plan itself is one of those things that seem to have been in the periphery of my knowledge forever, but I can remember the first time it focused sharply. It was in the spring of 2001 when I was doing the initial research for the first version of Afrika Reich and I was reading Michael Burleigh’s history of the Third Reich. On p.472 there is a passage about the Jews being exiled to Madagascar as an alternative to the Holocaust. The idea was fantastical, intriguing and full of dramatic potential; I knew I had to include it in the book I was working on. That was the ‘psychedelic’ version of Afrika Reich, the one that was too wacky for its own good and was ultimately rejected by all publishers. In that version there was an extensive subplot, told in flashback, about Burton the journalist (as he then was) travelling among the Jews of Madagascar trying to get a scoop. His failure to do so would lead him to the Congo and an even bigger story – i.e. Hochburg.

The finished draft of this book was huge, coming in at 240 000 words. Cuts had to be made and the Madagascar strand was a self-evident place to start, a pointed reinforced when an early reader from the publishing industry advised me that it was such a good idea it needed more space. It’s a book in its own right! she told me.

When I came back to Nazi Africa in 2007 (see Y is for...) that piece of advice stuck with me. I knew I wanted this new incarnation of The Afrika Reich to be a trilogy and Madagascar seemed the obvious setting for the middle book, with the original subplot expanded beyond all recognition into its own story. This is what would become the novel soon to be published.

As an aside, the final act of the psychedelic Afrika Reich was set in the Sahara – and is the basis for Book 3. But I’m getting ahead of myself...

In the meantime, I like the idea how a single moment on a spring day would become a significant event in my life years later. There’s something incredibly optimistic about that, something we can all draw hope from. Because what seems trivial at one point may lead to all sorts of unexpected places. Who knows, perhaps someone, somewhere is reading this blog and one day will see it as the origin of their own adventure.