An academic analyzing the possibly fantastical diary of a former SS officer struggles to come to grips with his own son’s death in Finch’s novel.

During the construction of the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria, a chocolate box containing the personal effects—including a diary—of an SS officer named Rikard Anton Boecker is unearthed. The unnamed protagonist and narrator of this mesmerizing novel, a university professor in Manchester, England, volunteers to read the diary and, as best as possible, determine its historical veracity, a difficult challenge given its nature as an “amalgam of fact and fiction.” The central story that emerges from the diary is astonishing: Boecker—who was born Martin Tauber but changed his name for reasons that only become hazily intelligible by the end of the novel—claims a vigilante named Karl Redlich brutally terrorized Nazis in Berlin, a profoundly implausible tale. The more deeply the protagonist considers the diary of the man whose “face wears a deathly seriousness,” the more he considers the author an unreliable narrator, maybe even psychologically disturbed. He wonders if the story is the fantasy of a “helpless bureaucrat” who could no longer bear his own moral complicity in Nazi crimes, a “revenge fantasy told by a man in no position to stop it.” The narrator, who comes to believe Tauber killed himself, wrestles with the suicide of his own son, Zach, a tragedy so heartrending it precipitated the collapse of his marriage to his wife, Ruth.

This is an eclectically structured novel—in addition the protagonist’s first-person narration, the text includes his synopsis of Tauber’s diary and the analysis of it he composed. This unique compositional style blurs the lines between the academic and the personal, between intellectual appraisal and emotional reaction, in a provocative and affecting dissolution of traditional binaries. Given the inexhaustibleness of Holocaust literature, one might think an original contribution to the genre is impossible, but Finch’s novel earns the distinction. The profile of Tauber that emerges—always slippery and impressionistic—is, whether real or imagined, tantalizingly complex. Tauber was not a fundamentally political man, and certainly not an enthusiastic disciple of Nazi ideology; the death of his wife Emilie, which may have been a suicide, seemed to impress upon him a moral clarity lost in what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.” The narrator of the story is equally multifaceted, an impressively cultured man with bottomless reserves of erudition stymied by a spiritual ennui. Tauber’s story is one he can move past, but it stirs something in him comparable to the way Emilie’s probable suicide awakened Tauber from his amoral slumber. “Zach was a different story, he was a lifelong tenant, sliding rent checks under my door without so much as a friendly reminder. In death, he was present in ways that he wasn’t in life, a perpetual shadow that danced inside my own.” Among the novel’s many virtues is Finch’s prose, which swings from the lucid rigor of analysis to haunting poetry.

A powerful book, literarily inventive and emotionally poignant.

A fast-paced, bizarre, iconoclastic farce anchored by an endearing filial relationship between a journalist and his assistant.

Finch’s novel follows Arthur Magpie—abrasive, highbrow, English journalist and high-functioning, chain-smoking alcoholic—who almost always calls his assistant “darling” and crashes his automobile into something on almost every road. The narrator of the tale is Arthur’s assistant, Ian Swansea, who recounts in an author’s note that he was employed by Mr. Magpie from 2002-2010, following their first chance encounter during an incident involving stampeding bulls, loose from a staged apocalypse complete with ceremonial robes and a Venetian mask. Finch’s book is exhaustively funny; as Arthur and Ian move from assignment to assignment, there are book jokes, philosophy jokes, smutty jokes, pratfalls and shtick, and wild plot turns around every corner. The story is as outlandish as its chapter titles, which include “Another Donkey Holiday,” “Disco Cupcakes” and “Burning the Ken.” The one-liners are riotous—“Christ was a lot of things, but he was a socialist first and foremost”—and lampooned versions of political figures and authors, the targets of Arthur’s cutting pen or irreverent tongue, are amusing. But the strongest laughs come from the work Finch puts into developing Arthur and Ian’s rapport. Most of the novel reads like an idea for a whodunit drowned in Benzedrine and barbiturates and re-imagined as a satire of the last few decades. Without the genuinely caring master-acolyte relationship, the book is multidirectional to the point of being a bit of a blur. So many characters are introduced and continents traversed, literally and metaphorically, that the loose plot doesn’t unwind until the end of Chapter 5 (out of 10), “After Hours in the Afterlife,” when it’s revealed that the death threat Arthur received earlier was perpetrated by a former student, and that the story racing toward resolution, peaceful or bloody, regards the plot on Arthur’s life. Through it all, Arthur doesn’t stop for air, and readers won’t either, so long as they don’t mind diversions.

Finch treats serious issues whimsically without being flippant, to deeply entertaining effect.