The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

The Violent Century Reviews

• 
  Dave

  Lavie Tidhar’s novels dwell in some clouded never-realm, mixing fact, fiction, reality, and fantasy in a potent gumbo. His wondrous creations, however, often do not follow standard protocol of plot lines. “The Violent Century” is a hybrid mix of X-Men with Inglorious Bastards. It revisits the Second World War with superhumans fighting secretly for both sides. In Britain, the mutants are gathered into a school, a farm, a world where there talents can be cultivated before they are sent out and charged with saving the world. Saving the world means doing battle with the Nazi’s own ubermen whether in Soviet Russia, in Transylvania alongside partisans, or in secret missions in Paris. Along with the battle of superheroes, Tidhar deals with Dr. Mengele, Aushwitz, and the untold battles of thousands of unarmed civilians against the Great Evil.
  
  Much of the story flips back and forth between the farm in Britain pre-war as the great clouds of battle are gathering and the missions throughout the war. But, other time jumping episodes take us through the remainder of the twentieth century from the Cold War and the Berlin Wall to the secret war in Laos to the arming of a young Bin Ladin in Afghanistan (amidst a warning to execute him before...) to the planes launching into the towers as a new century dawned and the age-old battle against evil continued.
  
  The story is told through the adventures of Fogg and Oblivion, two superpowered entities who meet on the farm as children and again throughout the century. They are complex, flawed characters who, despite their awesome powers, are enveloped in loneliness and sadness and never seem to be able to bask in the glory of their accomplishments. The chapters are short. The chapters skip around in time. Moral, ethical questions are posed. A rather unique achievement.
  
  Many thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.
• 
  Gavin

  I picked up this superhero novel in the hopes that it would be like a book version of the Watchmen movie. Unfortunately it never played out like that. The Watchman movie had an interesting and captivating narrator in the form of Rorschach and a whole bunch of interesting secondary characters. The problem with The Violent Century was simply that it lacked anything even remotely engaging or captivating. The story was sloooooow, the writing distant, and the characters completely bland.
  
  The basic premise was pretty interesting. Superhumans Fog and Oblivion worked as agents for the secretive Retirement Bureau. A superhuman defence force for the UK. They protected the UK for years until an incident at the end of the Second World War split the pairing. The story picks up in the modern day, with both guys having not aged a day in the last 70 years, as Fog is recalled to the Retirement Bureau after an attempt to retire. As we wait to learn his latest mission we get flashbacks to his past. His childhood, how he gained his powers, how he was conscripted to the RB, how he met Oblivion, and the work he did for the RB.
  
  It should have been awesome, but the story was told in a way that made it all incredibly boring. I made it to the 33% mark before deciding to move on to more interesting reads.
  
  This was one of two Lavie Tidhar books on my to-read list, but after failing to gel with the authors writing I doubt I'll bother trying the other.
  
  Rating: 2 stars.
  
  Audio Note: Jonathan Keeble gave an acceptable performance.
• 
  Helen

  What makes a man?
  
  What makes a hero?
  
  A tall, pale, aristocratic-looking man walks into a pub in London. The pub is almost impossible to find, hidden under a railway arch, lost in thick fog. There is only one patron at the bar.
  
  “The Old Man wants to have a word with you,” the tall, aristocratic man tells him.
  
  Clearly, these men know each other well. No, the man at the bar growls, he’s retired. It’s about an old file, the tall man explains. Which file, the bar patron wants to know.
  
  Oblivion says a single word. Sommertag.
  
  The fug of smoke crescendos around Fogg, a beekeeper’s protective mask. That single word, like a bullet with a name engraved on its side.
  
  The bar patron hurls his shot glass at Oblivion’s head. Oblivion raises his hand, wiggles his fingers, and the glass disintegrates into dust. Without further resistance, the man at the bar rises and follows Oblivion to an office building, where the Old Man, his former spymaster, leads him gently through a series of questions about a missing week in 1943.
  
  The two men are Oblivion and Fogg. During World War II they were a team, recruited along with other mutants, men and women who developed miraculous abilities when they were caught in the Vomacht Wave. Recruited to a secret training facility called the Farm, these two lonely young men become friends while they learn to harness and control their unique powers.
  
  The backstory: In 1933, a German scientist by the name of Dr. Joachim Vomacht invented a machine that shot out a probability wave, altering every human being who happened to be in its path, all over the world. Suddenly, there are people who can create fire with a snap of their fingers. Some can turn saliva into a weapon, or conjure up ice, control time, or the weather. Some create walls of smoke and fog to hide behind. And as in real life, some are capable of destroying everything they touch.
  
  The Germans call them Ubermenschen—supermen. As always, there are people suspicious of such powers, and fearful of those who possess them. But as World War II draws near, each country goes seeking its own supermen — and devises ways to use them.
  
  The Axis and the Allies alike recruit their native Ubermenschen to fight the war. The Americans turn theirs into cartoonish national heroes, complete with silly costumes and publicists. But the British Ubermenschen spymaster trains his spies to be invisible.
  
  Oblivion is a man with a mysterious past and the terrifying ability to obliterate anything he touches. He’s a perfect spy, a man accustomed to living with secrets of his own. Henry Fogg is the bullied, sensitive son of the town drunk. He manages to fight his way up the social ladder to university in Cambridge (where, in fact, the British Secret Service really did cultivate spies), when he is spotted and drafted into the cause. Oblivion and Fogg complement each other; in the deadly places to which they are sent, Fogg creates a smokescreen to hide them, while Oblivion reaches out and does the dirty work.
  
  The Old Man, a Smiley-like figure who runs the British Ubermenschen unit, sends this dynamic duo to the worst of war-torn locations; to Minsk, where the Einsatzgruppen are hard at work shooting civilians and Jewish Russian supermen rise from the ice; to besieged Leningrad, where starving Russians are hacking the flesh off dead horses and Russian Ubermenschen like the Red Sickle and the Great Soviet destroy German soldiers from the sky; to Transylvania, where Ubermensch partisans lurk in the forests and Ubermensch SS men hunt for them; to Paris, which is enchanting and romantic even under German occupation.
  
  It is in Paris that Fogg breaks the rules, falling dangerously and irrevocably in love with someone on the German side, a girl with an extraordinary gift.
  
  Despite the Old Man’s directions, Henry’s innate decency and humanity bring Oblivion and Fogg into the battle. He is constitutionally unable to stand by and watch Nazis slaughter innocents.
  
  Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli author now living in London, is the winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award. He writes forcefully and cinematically about Auschwitz, about the fighting on the Eastern Front, about the brutality of war. There are searing, powerful chapters populated with Jewish Ubermenschen, who are cast as Russian and Romanian partisans, or fighters in the Warsaw ghetto.
  
  This is a novel about war, about courage, and about love, awash in questions of moral ambiguity. What makes a man? “The Violent Century” asks. What makes a hero? Can a man still be a hero if he lacks the quality of mercy? Is it still pure science if it is pressed into the service of pure evil? Should ordinary Germans have risked their lives to stand up against Hitler? If you had to make a deal with the devil in order to save someone you loved, would you do it? Is anyone innocent in wartime?
  
  The writing soars, traveling back and forth between the past and present, doing that thing science fiction does best, tackling big issues with the helpful distancing device of fantasy. Tidhar’s characters may be superheroes, but at heart they are flawed, sad, achingly lonely people, damaged by what they have seen and by what they have been forced to do, searching for love and some semblance of an ordinary life in a hostile world. Just like the rest of us.
  
  Imagine some crazy marriage of the movies X-Men First Class with the following books — Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” John LeCarre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” — and you begin to get an idea of what this book is like.
  
  This is an unforgettable read, with haunting, cinematic passages, moral choices in every shade of gray, and nuanced, deeply affecting characters.
• 
  Andy

  The story is told in a short synopsis style which means (to me) short choppy bullet style point non-sentences..... make sense? (prose some would call it) but it goes way behind that And..... its very..... well..... tiring is maybe the word & its an effort to read sometimes & certainly isn’t smooth. Even the dialogue is choppy
  
  Being an alternate timeline story with the text jumping from the present to jus about anywhere in the 20th century & in that respect the style works as sometimes the chapter is jus a short paragraph to fill us in on some small detail or nuance which will have a relevance somewhen.....? but for all 350 pages.... its a bit much Id say.
  
  Hence my quitting around the 50% mark.
  
  Its a shame as there’s maybe a decent story amongst it all but it fails to fully emerge.
  
  Its maybe a comic book story at times without the pictures & maybe the author would have been better served putting it into that format? The superhero styled characters would defo have suited it!
  
  2 stars is all as it's likely an ok read.
  
  Maybe my review should be more in style with the read.......... Story told synopsis style. Bullet point non-sentences. Tiring. Effort to read. Not smooth. Dialogue choppy. Alternate timelines that jump around. Land anywhere in 20th century. Appeasing style to suit story. 350 pages too much. Quit at 50%. A shame. Maybe a story there. Better suited to comic book. Superhero characters more suited to.
  
• 
  Tudor Ciocarlie

  For me, there were only two masterpieces in the superheroes genre: Alan Moore's Watchmen and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight. The Violent Century is certainly the third one. There is so much to be impressed with in this novel: the structure, the characters, the prose and alternate history, that is such a wonderful tool to examine the real 2nd World War, its hideous consequences and all the havoc and trauma it produced on the outside world and on the soul of the humans beings. In a way every participant in the World War who fought, ran, hid, died or survived was an Ubermensch.
• 
  Gabrielle

  Another review describes this book as a mash-up of “X-Men” and “Inglorious Basterds” (to which I had also compared “A Man Lies Dreaming” in a previous review), as if I wasn’t already totally in love with Lavie Tidhar’s work, that would have sold this book to me just as much as the blurb on the cover of my copy, which says: “Like Watchmen on crack”.
  
  Tidhar is one of those writers who never lets me down, who writes weird books that always keep me on my toes, glued to the page and squeaking excitedly all at once. He can definitely be a challenge, and I get why not everyone enjoys books like this: timelines that hopscotch around, short (sometimes to the point of abrupt) sentences, moral grey areas that makes everyone feel a little uncomfortable. But the rewards of pushing through and letting this pulpy WWII/superhero/spy thriller novel take you on a ride are absolutely worth the effort.
  
  Tidhar writes a lot of alt-WWII stories, always tackling a different angle, and in “The Violent Century”, he took the infamous concept of Ubermenschen, interprets it as “superheroes” and runs off with it, creating the Marvel-like (but also, absolutely not Marvel-like at all) story of Oblivion and Fogg, two men with very peculiar abilities who are recruited by the British government at the beginning of the war. While their mission is originally only to observe, they inevitably get involved, and the consequences have terrifying ramifications.
  
  I really enjoyed the way Tidhar approaches the question of how these super-humans came to be, and the distinct way they are treated depending on the country in which they were born, making an interesting statement about how different cultures view the concept of “greatness” and how it should be used. As is often the case in his books, I wish there were a few more female characters front and center, but the ones who are there are not to be under-estimated; I wish wished they had more page-time, but he sticks to the noir, hard-boiled thing where you see the dames but they aren’t the heroes.
  
  I had a busy work week, and was very annoyed that there was no real way for me to hide under my desk with the book, because that is totally what I wanted to do. Tidhar’s characters are not often endearing, but you want to know what will happen to them, how far will they have to go, if they’ll actually make it to the end of the book unscathed. I absolutely love the ride, and if you are a fan of his books, get this one immediately! For newbies, this one is not a bad place to start!
• 
  Bandit

  This is my second read by the author, following his latest book. This one is actually a rerelease from years ago. And I’m thinking Tidhar is an author best appreciated from a rear view mirror perspective. Or, is that doesn’t come across as flatteringly as it’s meant to, his work is the forest not the trees. The trees are easy to get hung up on, because there are so many. And his writing may not be for everyone, in this book there are terrific descriptions, but they read like stage directions. And the timelines jump around with dizzying speed. Toward the end, even midsentence. It actually works well for the novel’s denouement, but it can be disorienting in general. But when you step far enough away to take in the entire thing or consider the book after it’s finished, it’s a work of art. Ambitious, original, smart, daring and exciting. This book has a terrific and oh so erudite foreword which discusses the subgenre of Jewish resistance during WWII, especially via supernatural means. Think along the lines of Inglorious Bastards. But with something extra. Tidhar in this book reimagines the recent century with superheroes or more like people with supernatural abilities, developed following a scientific experiment. Because some exist in every nation, the often balance of cancel each other out, so that the main wars and armed conflicts play out much the same way, but there are conceptually fascinating differences and historical alterations nevertheless. So it’s such an interesting work and it’s done in a variety of genres from noir to spy fiction to sci fi to thriller, there’s even a love story, which not only fits perfectly, it also provides an absolutely perfect ending. The past reimagined, enhanced even, but still recognizably a dramatic, tragic past of violent confrontations and global devastations and amid it all superheroes that don’t require tights or crazy backstories, all too relatable, flawed, complex men and women with abilities they’ve never asked for trying to save the world set on destroying itself. Great story, really great story. Once you get into the writing, it has as certain sweeping quality that’s always so great for a properly immersive reading experience. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
• 
  Lukasz

  The Violent Century defies easy categorization. It’s as much a romance as a spy novel or a murder mystery. It’s also a memoir of a meaningful friendship. It revolves around deeply flawed Übermenschen (superheroes). So… let’s call it an alt-historical superhero thriller with romance and murder mystery?
  
  Yeah, that fits. More or less.  
  
  

  What makes a hero? A hero stands up to injustice. A hero triumphs over odds. A hero fights pirates, sails a raft down a volatile waterway, a hero is a boy and a boy is a hero, good triumphing over bad.

  
  
  Every Superhuman has an origin story, telling how they gained their powers and decided to fight crime or become criminals. You’ll find nothing so obvious in The Violent Century. German scientist, Vomacht, created a machine that sent a probability wave of changes across the entire world. Random people gained unusual abilities and superpowers. 
  
  British Henry Fogg, for example, can control fog. It doesn’t sound impressive, but you should never underestimate him. British intelligence services found his powers interesting enough to recruit and train him on a Farm. As a British agent, Fogg observes and experiences crucial parts of WWII. His loyalties are tested when he meets a beautiful and superpowered woman. 
  
  A word of caution here. The story isn’t complicated, but the writing style is. The narrative moves forward and backward through time using rapid scene shifts. It opens with Oblivion delivering a message to Fogg - The Old Man wants to speak with him about what happened in 1946. Immediately after this, the story jumps to the mid-1930s and from there to the 1940s and further along the way.
  
  

  Trinity College, Cambridge. The Rolls comes to a stop. A sea of grass. Students in groups, sitting in the sun. Samuel comes around and opens the passenger door, The Old Man climbs out. Stretches. Sun on his face.

   
  
  Tidhar’s prose is minimalist, composed of short and sharp sentences with almost no exposition. His fractured writing style makes it rather difficult to read in the beginning and requires a bit of trust from the reader. Tidhar knows what he’s doing and once you get used to his writing, you’ll appreciate how powerful it can be.
  
  I think Tidhar played with the powers attributed to the Übermenschen. Not only are they exaggerated, but they also express, mockingly, their national identities (Fogg, a Londoner, controls Fog; Nazis are evil incarnated, Soviets tragic, Americans flashy and arrogant). Somehow, though, they give each historical period a distinctive feel and remain believably human.
  
  The Violent Century is both demanding and rewarding. It won’t appeal to everyone and I understand why some readers will put it aside because of time jumps and fractured writing style. I’ve almost done it myself; luckily I’ve persevered. If you give it a chance, you may discover it’s one of the rare books that stay with the reader long after they finish the last page. 
  
  
• 
  Daniel Polansky

  Reading a book by a person you know is a lose/lose proposition. Either you like it, which is damaging to the ego and corrupting to any similar ideas you may have had, or you don't like it, and are forced to mouth lies to them at gatherings. I've known Lavie Tidhar for, I dunno, four or five years now, quite casually, we send each other mean twitter messages and meet for drinks on extremely infrequent occasions. I have a short story in his for-charity anthology Jews Vs. Zombies. I do a really severely good impression of him, it's just savage, ask me at a bar sometime.
  
  Anyway, having never read anything else by the man I still get the sense this is one of his more commercial works, which is to say that it is resolutely noncommercial. The plot itself is relatively simple – a bit of John LeCarre, a pinch of Dashiell Hammet (anyone who has read this and my own Low Town trilogy, please take note that the 'Old Man''s appearance in both is an independent act of appropriation on each of our parts) but mostly just straight up WWII era Marvel Comics, Captain America knocking out Hitler, that sort of thing. But the style is, if not Finnegan's Wake, more dificult (seemingly) than most of what you will see in genre fiction – there are no quotation marks, for instance, and the story breaks with some frequency between descriptions of past events and characters commenting on these events in the present. I say seemingly because, in fact, the style is all cleverly slanted so as to provide the narrative a ferocious momentum, with expository information peppered in between the action. I really devoured this thing over the course of a short bus ride. The point being, I'm glad I didn't have any ideas for writing something about superheroes, because I'd probably have to chuck them. Good on you, Lavie.
• 
  Charles

  It has been awhile since I've read a superhero-based comic book. Although recently super-hero novels have become popular. This is a rather well-written, example of that genre. It is a mash-up of comic book
  Golden Age superheroes updated to modern
  Marvel X-Men standards and MI6 spymaster fiction.
  
  The writing is very good. That includes dialog, descriptive, and action sequence prose. It’s also British. The story has two POVs, and is made-up of out-of-order flashbacks going back through The (Violent) Century: 1936 to 1944 to the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These flashbacks and changing POVs make reading the story complicated. The flashback chapters are also very short. There is more than a hundred chapters. It also doesn't help that the dialog has no quotes about them. I think the author was trying for a literary Flip Book effect.
  
  Characters are good. The protagonist Henry Fogg is a rather cowardly green grocer's son who gets into public school. He is recruited into The Kings Service (a Section of MI6) by The Old Man who is modeled on
  William Stephenson. The Old Man is a mutant, but its never clear what his ability may be. Fog is a mutant who can manipulate aerosols. MI6 runs a school similar to
  Camp X as a feeder of mutants for the service. Here we meet the mutant Oblivion, a faux public school boy. Oblivion can transport matter out of this world-line into who-knows-where. Those three are the main characters. There are other Brit, American, Russian and German mutants that appear in the story. The author encourages you to conflate a mutant's name and ability with their character development throughout. In addition, I like the way he embroidered historical figures into the narrative.
  
  Mutants live forever, but can be killed. The world’s mutants are weaponized to fight in the wars, both overt and covert, of the second half of the 20th Century. The question, “What is a hero?” is a theme of the story. I thought the lonely, immortal as a witness to folly was a better plot.
  
  The quantum theory tech receives a bit of hand-waving. The old theory of collapsing waveform is referenced instead of the newer and harder to explain Quantum decoherence.
  
  Some knowledge of 20th Century history is needed to appreciate the author’s sly manipulation of events. For example, John F. Kennedy didn’t win the American presidential election of 1960 in the story.
  
  I liked this book. It wasn't great, but it was good in a different way. If you have an interest in comic book superheroes, and 20th Century history, particularly espionage you'll enjoy it. Its chief flaw is that its difficult to read in the beginning.
  
  If you're interested in superhero novels you may also find this list helpful:
  "Literary" Super Hero Novels.
• 
  Rinn

  I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review. Also posted on my blog,
  Rinn Reads.
  
  I somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about this book until it turned up on my doorstep. But once I’d learnt a little about it, I thought it sounded fascinating – superheroes and an alternate history, a particularly apt book considering I’m reading all the Marvel comics I can get my hands on at the moment. Plus that cover – how amazing is it?! Now I have to admit I’m really not a fan of World War stories, but I was excited about reading this one due to it being an alternate history.
  
  The story follows two superheroes, known as Oblivion and Fogg, their respective powers being able to obliterate anything, and produce and manipulate fog. Apparently people with these sorts of powers have been used to protect the world for centuries, and much of Fogg and Oblivion’s story takes place during and around World War II. I love the idea of people with these superhuman powers being recruited by the government and military, as part of special ops. However, the book frequently skipped between different locations and time periods which was, in some places, a little confusing – especially because these chapters were often only a page in length. Whilst it kept the story moving at a really fast pace, it also felt like there was no time to take things in.
  
  Whilst it has such positive reviews on Goodreads, it just did not live up to that expectation for me. I can see why people love it – personally I really enjoyed the story. It was mostly just the writing style that really didn’t click. Written in present third person, without speech marks, and often using short, clipped sentences that forgo pronouns and names, I just didn’t like it. Sometimes it felt like every non-essential word was just dropped from a sentence.
  
  But it’s not all doom and gloom in this review! Despite what it may seem, I DID enjoy this book. I loved the concept and the story (despite probably missing a few elements due to the pace) – it was just the writing style that really dragged the rating down for me. I found it difficult at times, and it just didn’t seem to flow. I don’t know why, but because of the setting (and perhaps the cover?), as well as the lack of speech marks, I was imagining the book as some black and white foreign film in my head, with subtitles – which was pretty fun! The way that Lavie Tidhar played on actual historical events was really clever.
  
  Overall, a brilliant story for all fans of superheroes and alternate histories, but sadly told in a style that I just did not get along with.
  
• 
  Liz Barnsley

  **3.5 stars for the story**
  
  I didnt finish this one, got halfway then realised I was just not with it - The writing style just didnt click with me. HOWEVER the story concept is terrific, and I liked the characters. But the purely descriptive prose, with even the speech being written as description, as an example :
  
  Quote
  
  The other says, there's a girl in there, she can make fire. Clicks his fingers. Says, Like that. Must be handy Fogg says. The other shrugs. Takes a drag. Blows out smoke. Fogg,idly,makes it into tiny airships that burst apart. Girl in here she can spit at stuff. Break it. Like she's firing bullets, the other says around the cigarette.
  
  End Quote
  
  just did not click with my reading brain. Do not let this put you off if you like the sound of the tale however - this is a purely subjective thing for me.. the next reader will adore it. There is nothing actually "wrong" with this book just was not for me.
  
  Happy Reading Folks!
  
  
• 
  Jack

  *copy provided by NetGally for an honest review*
  
  Hero. Villain. Spy. Demon. Saviour. Superhero.
  
  Übermensch.
  
  What happens to a world where, in a moment, history is forever changed. Where science goes too far, and people become immortal. Gain superpowers. What happens to the world?
  
  Not much. You can take humanity and give it all the wondrous superpowers that you can think of, but largely we'll keep on doing the same thing over and over again. The fact that the last century was so full of bloodshed and war, nothing could really change that.
  
  This is the story of many characters. Of Henry Fogg. Of Oblivion. Of the Old Man. Of countless others that fought through war, strife, only to find themselves left behind by a constantly changing world. Spanning the time period of pre-WW2 to the present day, and narrated by speakers unknown, we view the war from the side of the English, always the observers, never the movers or the shakers.
  
  I really enjoyed this book. I have a soft spot for superheros, it is true. But more than anything, I love it when fiction does something different. Be that turning tropes on it's head, be that inventing cosmic horrors, or be it simply stylistic choices. The Violent Century is narrated from an omnipresent viewpoint, with no (and unless my ebook did something wrong) clear delineation between the characters talking. Sounds like a small thing, but it does change the reading experience entirely.
  
  Continuing the stylistic choices, the story is broken up into little vignettes. Moments in history that give us understanding of why Fogg acts the way he does, or of why Oblivion seems so sad. Little by little we begin to grasp a picture of these people, and the things they experienced. It's a war story, so it's fundamentally devastating the things they went through, but told in such a way that it removes much of that horror. The narrator has seen it all before, and very little shocks them. You could say it almost creates a barrier to the emotional events that happen.
  
  It's hard to really go over what happens in this book. It's a superhero book, but bleak. It's a thriller in some ways, as you're always wondering where it's going. So much of it is told as a way of showing why the characters are the way they are, and while it does lead to a culmination at the end, I never really felt like that culmination was the strongest part of the story. Ultimately I think it was the characterisation and the desire to tell a multitude of little stories that made me so enjoy this book.
  
  I'll leave my meandering review at that.
• 
  Milo

  The Review:
  http://thefoundingfields.com/2013/10/....
  
  “An excellent standalone novel, Lavie Tidhar propels himself into the spotlight with one of the best novels of the year. After excelling with several novels in the past, The Violent Century is what raises the benchmark for his fiction and should be the novel that puts him on everybody’s must-read list. This book is just that good.” ~Bane of Kings, The Founding Fields
  
  
  They’d never meant to be heroes.
  
  For seventy years they’d guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable at first, bound together by a shared fate. Until a night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.
  
  But there must always be an account… and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.
  
  Recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism, a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms; of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields, to answer one last, impossible question:
  
  What makes a hero?
  
  Lavie Tidhar is an author that I’ve been meaning to read more of for a while. The other novel that I’ve read by him is The Great Game, published from Angry Robot a few years ago, and it really impressed me in how it played out, and left me really looking forward to more. When I got a copy of The Violent Century in the post to review I was pleased to say that it didn’t disappoint, delivering an awesome read right from the start, providing us with one of the more unusual novels of the year, as well as quite possibly one of the best. Lavie Tidhar’s latest novel is just that good, and really raises the bar of from The Great Game, despite being a very different novel to the fun steampunk novel that I last read, not realizing that it was the third novel in The Bookman series but understanding what happened nonetheless.
  
  This book has been praised as the meeting of Watchmen and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and it’s clear to see where such a comparison has been drawn from – both Fogg and Oblivion wouldn’t fit out of place in the universe shared by characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, and there are several similarites that it shares with the works of John le Carre. This isn’t an action-packed, all guns blazing novel that would work better as a comic book than a work of prose. The Violent Century is very much an unconventional novel – to the point where it not only could belong to a vast variety of genres, but also does it lack the use of speech marks as one would normally expect. The only other novel that I’ve read in my memory that has used this method is the fantastic The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell – and whilst that novel is a tale of survival in a zombie-ridden world, they still manage to be incredible novels, which is good to see as it’s always a risk when readers find themselves out of their comfort zone, but the reward is even greater when the risk pays off – as is the case with The Violent Century.
  
  The Violent CenturyWhilst I’m no stranger to superhero fiction, following a number of DC & Marvel comics myself as well as having read two other novels that could fall under this category in this year alone (Andrez Bergen’s Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? & Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart), this book still does fit out of my comfort zone mainly due to the large element that it draws from the spy genre – something that outside James Bond and Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider and Ed Brubaker’s recent Velvet #1 I’m not really familiar with. It was refreshing to see how the two genres work well when they’re combined together as Tidhar pulls it off very well indeed.
  
  Oblivion and Fogg are both retired members of a British department that deals with Übermenschen - or superheroes, following their creation in a science experiment. The novel sees Fogg brought out of retirement to see the handler of the Übermenschen, nicknamed The Old Man, in order to explain his actions during World War 2 and the subsequent Cold War, with Oblivion – who stood with Fogg for seventy years in the field – taking part in the debriefing. Through this method, we thus learn more about not only the characters but also this alternate world that they inhabit – and how the intervention of superpowered beings have altered history from its normal course.
  
  The less you know about The Violent Century, the more it will surprise you. It’s a delightful read, and aside from the comparisons to John Le Carre and Watchmen, fans of Ian Tregellis’ Milkweed novels will find something to love here. Both share a similar tone and feel, even if they do have their respective differences. Lavie Tidhar will find something to impress you regardless of whether you read multiple superhero comics each week or have never read a superhero book before. It’s dark, creative and wonderfully written – and comes highly recommended.
  
  VERDICT: 4/5
  
• 
  Laura Hughes

  The Violent Century is unlike anything I’ve ever read. A tale of conflict, espionage and superheroes set mainly during the various conflicts of the 20th century, it is most often compared to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Suffused with the moody intrigue of a John le Carre novel and written in a postmodern style similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lavie Tidhar’s standalone novel explores the hypothetical role of superheroes in historical conflicts, focusing in particular on World War II.
  
  The majority of the plot takes place at different points in the past, and is framed by a narrative involving the interrogation of one of the central characters. Tidhar’s superheroes, or ‘Ubermenschen’, are an exaggerated and deliberately stereotyped representation of the role and ideologies of their respective countries in each of the conflicts. From Britain there’s Oblivion and Fogg, shadowy and furtive and seemingly innocuous; from the USA there’s Tigerman and Green Gunman, ludicrously costumed and arrogant; from the USSR there’s the Red Sickle, from Transylvania there’s Bloodsucker and Drakul . . . you get the picture. These characters, along with the author’s masterful use of setting and atmosphere, really create a distinctive feel of each historical era, from post-war Berlin to the Eastern Front, the Afghan desert to WWII Transylvania.
  
  The Violent Century is definitely not for everyone. The style is very off-putting at first sight, and the time jumps are occasionally disorienting and disruptive; but the concept, and the atmosphere, kept me sufficiently immersed, and I even found that, once accustomed to it, the style actually makes for very fluent reading. My only criticism would be that I didn’t really feel there was enough exploration of Fogg’s motivations, and so the final payoff wasn’t quite as emotionally charged as I imagine it was intended to be. However, overall, the positives far outweigh the negatives. The tone is cynical yet wry, the underlying message - that the world would have turned out in exactly the same way even if superheroes did exist - is depressing yet oddly reassuring, and the finale is sad yet cathartic, and incredibly hopeful. All in all, a memorable story that will probably stay with me for quite some time. Definitely worth a read.
  
• 
  Alex Sarll

  The great and the good queue up to compare this to le Carré doing cold war superheroes, or Nietzsche writing the X-Men. Which I'm fairly sure some of the better X-Men runs already were, not to mention at least one of the early films, and The Violent Century never quite shakes a sense of being less revolutionary, and closer to its parent genre, than the illustrious blurbers (and perhaps its author too) seem to think. True, there is that same sense, as in le Carré, of an underlying futility to this war in the shadows, that as with spies, both sides having superhumans means much the same result as if neither side did – except, of course, for a few more lives interestingly screwed up along the way. Sure, it remixes a few familiar superhero tropes, with superpowers arriving during the Second World War, and their bearers then surviving into the modern day (or something like it*) outwardly unchanged by the years. But even this reminds me of Zenith, or Wild Cards – two takes on superheroes which were revisionist in the eighties, but now feel like part of the mainstream. Compare this to the rigorously ghastly and apocalyptic wartime superpowers rework Uber (which, like Tidhar, finds a prominent role for Alan Turing), or even David Brin's earlier Life Eaters, and it becomes clear that Tidhar's take is really not as radical as all that. And, on a separate tack, having the scientist responsible for the superpowers be called Vomacht just meant that I kept being nudged by what seemed like a Cordwainer Smith reference, without ever quite grasping what that would be intended to convey if so. This being Tidhar, there are also the obligatory glimpses of other worlds that might have been, including various people who in our world invented superheroes, but faced with the real thing are instead chronicling them. A bit of a stretch, this: Siegel and Shuster could barely even produce competent funnybooks, so I can't see them making it in non-fiction or fine art; and of all Stanley Lieber's many cameos, a familiar catchphrase can't stop this being one of the least convincing.
  
  All of which said, so long as you don't expect the most startlingly new take in the world (or, alternately, if you're not au fait with the state of the superhero art anyway), this is still a Lavie Tidhar novel about superpowered espionage. Which, as pitches go, emphatically does not suck. From the horrors of the Eastern Front and the camps, through the ruins of Berlin, to the various bloody little proxy wars which filled out the 20th century and then came home to roost in the 21st, a cast of the changed and now unchanging dance around each other, enmities and alliances becoming increasingly tangled as the years tick on. The style sometimes recalls a screenplay or a comics script - seen from outside, told as to an artist or an actor, precise on what the audience can or can't deduce about moods and honesty and such. And this, combined with the deliberate opacity of the main protagonist, the mist-manipulating Fogg, and the chopped-up timeline, often makes for a cold and distanced read. But that alienated mood is the book's greatest strength, that sense of time having somehow got out of joint in the early 20th century and nothing since having quite been real. Set against which, the promise represented in fleeting moments by one of the changed, the one among them who seems to have been untainted by it all, and who has what may be the best superpower of the lot: the ability always to go back to that one perfect summer day before everything changed.
  
  *The opening scenes suggest a far more noir London than the one I live in, and I really hope it's a deliberate joke how much scarier the Hole in Wall pub is here than in real life.
  
  (Netgalley ARC)
• 
  Jasper

  originally posted at:
  http://thebookplank.blogspot.com/2014...
  
  If you drop the name Lavie Tidhar to anyone who is reading science fiction or fantasy they are bound to say, isn't he the guy that won the 2012 World Fantasy Awards with his book Osama? Yes you are correct. Now I have been unfortunate in not having been able to read it, but when I saw that Hodder and Stoughthon were publishing another book of him, about superheroes, well I was excited to say the least. With Lavie Tidhar's praises in the back of my mind and the promise of another superhero story, The Violent Century could only turn out for the better and well it does that and a whole lot of something extra as well!
  
  The first thing that really falls to note is the way that The Violent Century is written. It is not your standard type of narration. It is hard to describe, on one level you do follow several person directly but the way Lavie Tidhar narrates his story telling puts the reader in more of an bird's eye view. The way the narration was done did take some getting used to but once you were into the story it was really hard to part with. This fresh take on telling the story had just something magical to it. The second thing that you will undoubtedly notice is the dark and grim setting and this combined with the narration really makes it all come to turn our for the better. In the book there are many flashbacks back into the past, second world war and other events that shaped the twentieth century, these flashbacks are all done a great justice by this narration and the setting that Lavie Tidhar introduces. The Violent Century though it features superheroes, this isn't your standard spider-man or some such type of story but Lavie Tidhar asks questions, sometime even deeper that I had thought, questions like in the synopsis: what makes a hero, what are they exactly? He explores ulterior motives, I hadn't assumed that this book would grip me in this way... just perfect. Even by the dark and often grim setting The Violent Century is beautiful.
  
  The Violent Century follows mostly the story of Henry Fogg and all that has happened int he second world war. Fogg is being called in by the Old Man to retell his story about certain events that transpired in that period. One of Fogg's friends, Oblivion, is there to get Fogg back to the Retirement Bureau, think of the Retirement Bureau as something in the lines of the HQ like MI6. Immediately after this recalling to the Retirement Bureau the story takes off at a nice steady and utterly addictive pacing. In designing the story of The Violent Century, you can clearly see that Lavie Tidhar has invested a lot of time to leave out no detail at all. The story takes place in both present and past times going as far back as when Fogg was still a kid. I really liked how well-structured and layered Lavie Tidhar made his story. Mostly because in the beginning you are cofnrotned with the current situation, heroes past their prime, but they have gone through a lot and they still have their powers, one of the essences of this story is telling how everything came to pass with a strong emotional current. So Fogg's background is very interesting and he is one of the few British children who has special powers and he is taken to "The Farm" where he and other children that have supernatural powers are trained to control it. As you might tell from the name of Fogg, he can do something with fog. On first this might seem as a bit of a weak power but again Lavie Tidhar shows that he can turn the tables on this as well. Though the start up of the story does explain a lot in terms of Fogg's character, the actual events of why Fogg is being recalled to the Retirement Bureau involve what happened in the second world war.
  
  In showing what transpired in the second world war Lavie Tidhar takes readers to various geographical locations, from Berlin in Germany to Minsk in Russia and Paris in France. In visiting these various places you get to learn a lot more about everything how it went down, and you also get to meet superheroes from different countries. I liked how these supernatural humans were used during the whole story they are held by most in a state of awe and fear, but they are powerful, in the Nazi regime they are termed the Übermensch. The American heroes are all "show how good and great our country is", and the British heroes are much more modest but just as deadly. Another great thing about showing the superheroes was that the story isn't flooded with them, there are a few that you follow from each basecamp, they also don't use their powers in a tour de force, they show what they can do sporadically, this kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time because you soon learn that most of the superheroes have deadly powers, and now that I think of it, it might be that they themselves might even fear their own power.. just a little bit.. Because when they start unleashing their powers... destruction is imminent. The superheroes from the different countries all carry several virtues and vices of their own, for example the Russian ones are often found in a drunken state. If you look closely at the story you can actually see another story intermingled in the main one, primarily for me the story was about Fogg and the German superhero Schneesturm, this deadly hero is able to control and summon frigid storms. Introducing as a side track in this main story is a secondary love story centering around Fogg. Exploring this side track really helped in giving yet another plus for a well rounded story as you not only get the full action low down but you also see a much more sensitive side of many different characters and helps to raise many more questions in the lines of What makes a hero?
  
  
  Lavie Tidhar proves with The Violent Century that he is definitely an author to add to your favorites list. The Violent Century is much, much more than you standard superhero face-off book. Even though the story is written as a novel, it reads away like a comic and Lavie Tidhar has a interesting and lively narration (it did took some getting used to but once you are in to the style, you wouldn't wish it to be any other) that places you directly into the story with a nice bird eye perspective, this gives you as a reader the full experience of this amazing book. But The Violent Century isn't only about action and as you get deeper and deeper into the story and read about what happened in the beginning of Fogg's life and all throughout his missions you see a strong emotional undercurrent that steadily drives the story further. The ending for me, the reasoning of the Old Man only added to the emotional side of the story. The Violent Century is one of those books that lives up to you expectations and goes way beyond it, make sure you get reading it asap, it won't let you down.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Mieneke

  What makes a man? What makes a hero? Both are questions often asked by different characters throughout Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century. In some ways these are the central questions to the narrative, but neither question is answered in a definitive fashion. The reader is left to formulate her own answer. Tidhar's story is set over the course of the twentieth century, whose violent years gave rise to many heroes, both the comic book kind and those of flesh and blood The narrative shows us these comic book heroes made flesh though an accident with the machine created by the German scientist Dr Vomacht, in an alternate reality that is amazingly detailed in its historical facts and just 'off' enough to feel rather alien at times. Its mood is noir and slowly moves from moody black and white to the grimy over-saturated colours of the sixties on to a still gritty, but sharply-defined present.
  
  Heroism is at the core of the story. All of the Changed are regarded as superheroes, though only the American Changed are designated as such. The others are called Changed or Übermenschen, a term whose connotations – especially given the book's mainly WWII setting – left me uncomfortable and wondering at the ultimate goal for Dr Vomacht's machine. Vomacht's ultimate motivation, beyond studying life, never becomes clear and it's never clear what his machine was actually meant to do. But while they are all shown as Heroes, be they superheroes, Changed or Übermensch, I found the truly heroic moments were found in those brief spells where their humanity shone through. Tank's interposing himself between Oblivion and Fogg and the Nazi’s, with a last exhortation to get to safety, Mr Blur's last sweet smile before running off, so Fogg could make his retreat. Kerach's self-sacrifice to avenge his comrades and not co-incidentally let Oblivion and Fogg get away is another good example. It's these glimpses of humanity and the strong show of fellow feeling between the agents of the Bureau of Superannuated Affairs, especially between Fogg and Oblivion, which make the characters come alive and shine.
  
  The central relationships of the narrative are those between Fogg and Oblivion and Fogg and Sommertag. Fogg and Oblivion are partners and best friends, though Oblivion is gay – or at least bisexual – and there are hints here and there that the relationship at times had gone further than friendship, though this is never explicitly confirmed and might even just be unrequited desires on Oblivion's side or even this reader's faulty interpretation. Sommertag is the unexpected love of Fogg's existence and it's her relationship with Fogg that creates most of the tension in Fogg's life – between him and Oblivion and him and his service to King and Country. While the instant rapport between Fogg and Sommertag seemed somewhat forced, I liked seeing what she loosened in the restrained Fogg. But to me the most interesting relationship was between Fogg and Oblivion. The ending of the book is heart-breaking and made me think that no matter how long and well we know another, we'll never know their entire self.
  
  Stylistically The Violent Century is very strong and quite interesting. Tidhar chooses to tell his story in a great many short chapters, the final tally is 164 and these chapters often switch between time periods and not always the time period stated at the start of the books the narrative is divided into. It weaves an intricate tapestry of motives, memories, history, and world building. Tidhar also doesn't use quotation marks in his dialogues, which took me a while to get used to—it's funny to realise how accustomed we are to the common use of punctuation and how disorienting leaving just one element out. On the whole the stylistics are fabulous, though at times it made for having to reread passages several times before they make sense.
  
  The Violent Century was my first long-form encounter with Lavie Tidhar and hopefully it won't be my last. I was very impressed by this war torn superhero narrative, which touches upon sensitive topics such as the Holocaust, the Eichmann trial, World War II atrocities, but also on less well-known wars such as the Laotian Civil War and US involvement therein and ever holds up a mirror asking us: "What makes a man?" A story that sings around for a bit and got stuck in my head, The Violent Century is a strong contender for my top ten this year.
  
  This book was provided for review by the
  publisher.
• 
  Cathy

  3.5 stars. It was fun and clever and weird and interesting and entertaining and also the kind of genre fiction that can be important too, the kind I really love that says a lot while it entertains. There was a lot of real history with a big impact woven into this story, some things I knew and some that surprised me and all things that it was good to feel the emotions of, to be reminded of. Like Operation Paperclip wasn't a pretend operation in the book where the U.S. took German superheroes and scientists to the U.S., it was a real operation where this country brought German scientists to the U.S, as evidenced in the book with the citation about Wernher von Braun heading the team that developed the rocket research that let the Apollo 11 mission land on the moon in 1969. He went from being the Nazi and SS "rocket man" to getting a United States National Medal of Science. Because apparently people who had enough to contribute could be forgiven for their heinous crimes. If Mengele's research had been more productive he might have ended up here too. Lucky we didn't need physicians as much as physicists. They actually made von Braun a citizen too, because war crimes are forgivable for some people. But being a poor immigrant never is, according to current rhetoric. There was a lot of stuff in the book about the Holocaust and World War II that was important to acknowledge, how hard war is on the people who fight, how unglamorous it is, how the people fighting often don't understand many of the choices that are made by the leaderships but keep trying to do their duty anyway often under nearly impossible circumstances. There was a lot that had big impacts layered between the interesting story that was weaving back and forth in time. And there was more interesting history woven in that was lighter in tone, for example the Comics Code, something that seemed crazy when I read it in the book but is totally a real thing. Apparently in 1954 there was so much concern about content in comic books corrupting people that the Senate had hearings about it and the comics industry offered to self-regulate/censor itself by making sure good always triumphs over evil, there wasn't too much horror in the books, etc. Books that complied were marked with the stamp of approval until 2010! It's wild, look it up.
  
  It was a powerful book, a weird book, an interesting book, a clever book. Was it a fun book? Kind of. I was interested the whole time. There's something about it that makes it not a great book. I don't know what it's missing, some kind of a spark somehow maybe. And it is hard to read because of the way the author chose to format it, there are no quotation marks and following the dialogue is difficult. I don't know what his reason for it was, I'm sure he had a very clear intention. It does make it feel dreamier, less real. It contributed to my feeling that it was slow somehow. But it's quite interesting and could be a good read for a lot of people.
• 
  Tomislav

  Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, living in the UK. His first novel
  Osama (2011) won the World Fantasy Award, and The Violent Century was his second novel. His subsequent science fiction novel
  Central Station (2016) won multiple awards, and has led to a resurgence of his backlist, including The Violent Century. I have previously read his novels Central Station and
  Unholy Land (2018), and liked both.
  
  In 1932, a young boy in the English countryside experiences a transformation, at the same time as a transformation of all humans occurs to a greater or lesser extent, known as the Vomacht Wave. Throughout the world, those who obtained special powers are swept up by their governments and groomed for military and espionage work. In a backdrop encompassing World War II, and the Cold War, and other conflicts, these Übermenschen become known to each other individually. Young Henry (now Fogg) and Oblivion are two such British agents, paired up in Europe during and after the war.
  
  Fogg searches for meaning, to know if there truly is a good or evil purpose, in a world of justified violence, and redefinition of sides. Events of various episodes are revealed in the context of a present-time investigation by The Old Man who, in theory, directs Fogg and Oblivion. The inner relationship of Fogg to Nazi Dr. Vomacht’s daughter Sommertag, and also with Oblivion provide character interest. This is a very polished novel stylistically, that somehow still suffers from an unrealistic concept not dissimilar to the X-Men. I recommend reading it, but with that reservation.
  
  I received an ebook advance reader copy from Tachyon Publications through netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The book was previously released in 2013 by Hodder and Stoughton.
• 
  Xavi

  7'5-10
  Me ha gustado mucho la estructura comiquera de la novela, así como la trama. Lástima que al final se desinfle un poco...Tidhar continua proponiendo historias muy interesantes.
  
  https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/20...
• 
  Phil

  Fantastic - literally - work of imagination by one of the great SF writers of the present time. It starts as a sort of Nietzschean riff on "Captain America", the conceit being that all sides in the Second World War actually *did* have their own secret corps of agents with superpowers (i.e. 'Uebermenschen') and weaves this into an account of the late 20th century via modifications to real lives and historical events associated with that period of wars and intrigue. And as always, Tidhar elevates this comic-book premiss to something akin to tragedy, with plenty of humour and plot-twists along the way in a thoroughly absorbing, engaging and, yes, literary novel.
  
  One thing that always strikes me about his novels is the way their characters, initially defined by eccentricities and oddities (in this case superhero powers) gradually metamorphose, without one being really aware of it happening, into three-dimensional, living people whose lives - no matter how alien - really seem to matter. Since this is still, so far as I am concerned, the *sine qua non* of the novel, Tidhar's deft facility with it marks him out as one of the finest novelists, in any genre, currently writing.
• 
  Gerhard

  Mmm. So another Lavie Tidhar in a different multiverse (re)wrote
  Osama ... and this is the result, replete with superheroes, or Übermenschen, as the Nazis called them. This version of Tidhar makes a terrible 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane?' Superman 9/11 joke, to boot. Well, genre tropes are like the oysters in Pretty Woman that Julia Roberts referred to as 'slippery little fuckers'. If you thought that
  Osama was timey-wimey, this one is enough to give even the most devoted Back to the Future/David Lynch fan a major existential headache.
• 
  Nick Sayce

  Not since Alan Moore's The Watch Men have I read a superhero tale of such magnitude that I never wanted it to end.
  The book is awesome and written in a way that makes it all feel so believable. The beyond-men feel so real. They are flawed, confused and yet also heroic - showing that in war everyone believes they are fighting on the right side.
  The book is steeped in history, using real life individuals who help convey the true horrors of war.
  Plus the prose of the book, though it may take a while to get used to, has a style of its very own.
  This is no flashy superhero book. Instead this a grand tale of normal people, who become heroes, act like villains and spans the last 50 years which have been defined by multiple wars.
  The only downside with this book was that it had to end.
• 
  edifanob

  I'm deeply impressed and emotionally touched.
  
  What makes a man? What makes a hero?
  These two questions appear again and again within the story. Fortunately Lavie Tidhar avoided to answer these questions. It is up to the reader to find his/her answer after reading the book.
  
  
  This is definitely one of the best books I read in 2014 so far.
• 
  Nancy

  You have a choice. We all have a choice. We can give in to the darkness, or we can fight it, and elect to try and make the world a slightly less terrible place than it is. from The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
  
  The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar is one of those out-of-my-genre reads that I indulge in regularly. Tidhar imagines an alternate reality in which humans with special powers--superheroes--are conscripted for use by the Axis and Allies during WWII.
  
  I was not a superhero comic book reader as a girl, was mildly interested in the Superman movie and television shows, saw some X-Men and Spiderman movies when my son was growing up. Early, I wasn't really in the flow with the novel. But there came a point in the book when the tide shifted, and instead of reading because I had committed to reading it, I was reading because I was truly intrigued and driven to read.
  
  Tidhar imagines the creation of a machine that transforms humans, giving them superpowers, preventing them from aging but not from being killed. In Britain, The Old Man brought these misfits to a special school. Friendship circles formed. There is Oblivion who can evaporate objects and Fogg who produces a visual shield, and Tank, Mr. Blur, Mrs. Tinkle.
  
  I'm here to take you to a special school. For special people. People like you. Where you will be happy, the Old Man says. from The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
  
  During WWII, these Übermenschen were tracked down by spotters working for the Germans and Russians to be used in the war effort. Oblivion and Fogg are sent to 'observe' what is going on in Berlin.
  
  Berlin in '46 was an insane asylum. from The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
  
  They encounter others with superpowers, The Green Gunman, Frogman, Girl Surfer, The Electric Twins, Whirlwind, and Tigerman dressed in a bright costume, the Russians Red Sickle and the wolf man, and others who wreak havoc on behalf of the Nazis, including Schneestrum.
  
  Fogg meets Sommertag--Klara--the daughter of Vomacht who created the transformer device; he realizes her power is unaltered pureness and innocence. Fogg falls under her spell. The novel centers around Fogg being called to account for a series of events after the end of WWII involving Summertag.
  
  The history and atrocities of Nazi Germany and actual events inform the novel. Fogg's and Oblivion's school friend Tank is captured and used in Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz. Nazi scientists are repatriated to the United States, and war criminals tried and justice meted out.
  
  The story leaps back and forth in time, revealing the back story of the men's boyhood in 1926 and school days in 1936, the war years, and later 20th c wars and events. Then, it leaps into the future, to the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and 9-11.
  
  It is too fantastical, this world, with its marching armies and its rockets and its death camps. It's just the world of a cheap novel, surely. from The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
  
  The superhero myth appeals in times of crisis; the first superhero comics came onto the scene in 1938. Hitler banned American comic books; he thought the heroes were Jewish. Superman's creators were Jewish. Superhero movies took off after 9-11, a time when America again needed heroes.
  
  Meeting one's hero is always such a disappointment, Schneestrum says. from The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
  
  And throughout the book, the questions are raised. What makes a man? What makes a hero?
  
  We expect a hero to rescue us. In real life, sometimes no one comes.
  
  The publisher gave me access to a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
• 
  Kat

  Jakoś tak niechlujnie napisana książka.
• 
  David Harris

  The first thing to address reviewing this book - the unavoidable, obvious, distinctive thing - is the style. When I was 30 or 40 pages in, I nearly gave up with it. The way it's written is so distinctive, so odd. No speech marks. Present tense. Laconic. like this:
  
  The Old Man says, Where is the boy?
  - He's waiting, Deutsch says.
  - Then let's pick up the pace, shall we?
  
  Hovering over all is an unseen "we". We see this or hear that. "We" is a jaded, slightly cynical voice. Seen it all, or most of it. Heard nearly as much. It's almost the voice of an omnipotent narrator, but not quite. "We" sometimes shrugs, not totally sure about events, but in charge, all the same.
  
  It was all madly annoying to me, at first. But I carried on, and I'm glad I did, because fairly soon, everything clicked and I wasn't enjoying the book despite the style, the voice, but through the style and voice. There's something about it that makes the whole span of the story - with all its hops back and to, from pre war England to the Eastern Front, to Russia, to various murky cold war corners, to a shadowy secret Bureau in the present day - all present at once. It's like a non-visual comic book, perhaps, or maybe that's too pretentious. Whatever, it makes this story.
  
  And what a story it is. Wrapped round the perhaps hoary conventions of a Smiley-esque espionage plot - the faithful servant not allowed to depart in peace, but called back by the Old Man for one final debrief - we have a story of love, of rivalry, but above all of strangeness. Fogg - the hero, if the book has one: it's a moot point - is one of the "changed" - superheroes, created by a freak event in 1932. Throughout the world, a quantum wave has produced monsters, men and women with bizarre abilities: to wind back time, summon up ice and snow, or just make things disappear. Fighting on all sides during the Second World war and in those murky corners after, they struggle to make sense of what they are. Not ageing, but growing weary, they look back to the event that made them and wonder how it began.
  
  The concept gives Tidhar scope to range all over the place, leaping decades in a single bound to place some vignette in 1946 Berlin of at the heart of darkness in Vietnam, before jumping back - or forward again, his narrative only fixed in that it keeps returning to that last debrief, to Scheesturm and to Sommertag.
  
  This is so much better than the last book I read by Tidhar (The Bookman. It may not be to everyone's taste, but if you're wavering and thinking of giving up, please just do keep going.
  
  Excellent.