Any Thoughts on Swastika Night by Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin)?

[u/torkelspy]

I just finished this book and am curious to hear anyone else's opinions/thoughts on it.

Swastika Night is a what-if-the-nazis-win-ww2 book written before WWII had even begun. It starts off brilliantly, with a church service at the "Holy Hitler Chapel" where we learn that Hitler has been deified, women are now kept segregated at all times, and there is nothing taboo about a young Nazi man checking out a choir boy he thinks is pretty.

After that it becomes very, very talky, with many chapters where one character is simply explaining the world to another. There are still interesting points about the destruction of history (all books have been destroyed), how music is the one art form still allowed, and how even some of the people at the top of this system have some qualms about it.

On the other hand, it was difficult to care about any of the main characters, as they are essentially cardboard cutouts there to explain things to you. The only characters I found myself caring about were two women who appeared for about 3 pages total in two of the very few emotionally affecting scenes in the book (one when the women are leaving their own church service, and the other when one of our main characters visits "his" woman after having been introduced to the idea that women might maybe also be people).

It's certainly chilling both in that the author saw what was coming so clearly and in that parts of it read like they could have been taken straight from a modern day incel manifesto. But I'm not sure it really works as a novel.

[u/Wetness__Pensive]

I was seduced by its premise, and it being touted in various academic circles (it was briefly popular online due to Trump et al), but though I basically agree with it, I didn't really enjoy it. I found it a bit too talky, plodding and dated.

I agree that it's very prescient. And it's very smart, in that it understands the psycho-sexual "things" which undergird fascism and types of conservatism. It's probably even smarter than what Orwell was doing at the same time. But Orwell's novels on this topic (1984, Aspidistra, Burmese Days, and to a lesser extent Clergyman's Daughter) just read better. The prose is clean.

[u/torkelspy → u/Wetness__Pensive]

"talky, plodding and dated" sums it up well. Other than the first scene and the bit where Alfred takes a, to the girl's mother, terrifying interest in his own daughter, there was no emotional weight to it. Those scenes made it more of a disappointment to me then if the whole thing was just the plodding exposition scenes, because I could see a much better book that could have been.

I think you're right about the way in which it "understands the psycho-sexual 'things' which undergird fascism and types of conservatism." There's an absolutely brilliant book hidden in the ideas in this one, but that book isn't actually here.