“A War Without, a War Within”: A Review of Bob Van Laerhoven’s The Long Farewell

 

[Translated from Dutch by Vernon Pearce] (Next Chapter, 2025). ISBN: 978-4824156709

In 2021, I was asked to review a novel by an author named Bob Van Laerhoven. Set in South America in a time of revolution and turmoil, Alejandro’s Lie had the kind of depth and dark beauty of story and character that reminded me of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, and Frank Delaney’s Ireland—novels that you don’t just read; instead, you enter them fully and inhabit them, as they inhabit you.

After such a memorable, moving experience, I welcomed the chance to review The Long Farewell, especially when I saw that it took place before and during World War II. Although I’ve long been fascinated by the rise of the Nazis, with all that’s happening today (especially in America, where I reside), I’ve been compelled to read book after book about the years 1938 to 1945. As I started The Long Farewell, I’d just finished one book by Erik Larson, In the Garden of the Beasts, and was halfway through another, The Splendid and the Vile. I’d also just watched Nuremberg. The story of psychiatrist and military intelligence officer Douglas Kelley’s suicide after his warnings of future fascism were ignored brought tears of frustration to my eyes.

If only those warnings had been heeded…

Those who wish to educate themselves about other warnings about fascism should read the works of Albert Camus.

If there’s one key thing I’ve learned in 12 years of study, it’s that the cut and dry Good (Allies) versus Evil (Axis) narrative of World War II is anything but; some of the “Good” were as exceedingly ruthless, anti-Semitic, and greedy as the Evil. This is one of the many things I appreciate about Van Laerhoven’s novels—life (morality, politics, industry…) is messy, and Good and Evil are really a matter of degrees.

The Long Farewell opens with the insidious mission-vision of Adolf Hitler, in his own words: “[A] genuine peace, founded not on the olive-branch waving of weepy lament, rather on the triumphant sword of a master race that will make the world subservient to the building of a higher culture.”

The story takes place from 1934 to 1945. At the onset, our complex protagonist, Hermann, is a member of the Hitler Youth, although he’s unsure of the legitimacy and worth of the cause. His once-attendant father is an officer in Ernst Röhm’s SA (the Brown Shirts)—sullen, withdrawn, and, not surprisingly, given to violence. Hermann’s converted Catholic, Belarusian mother fled to Germany in 1919 as a refugee from the Russian revolution, believing the Germans had “saved” her and her people (illumination of the truth slowly unfolds over the course of the narrative).

If this sounds like a potent mixture of personalities in a single household, you’ll not be disappointed. It’s the key domino in what will be a complicated, intricate series of collapses.

In the early part of the novel (1934 through 1937), we meet Hitler (still Reich chancellor), Goebbels, Röhm, and Himmler (along with his infamous rubber stamps). Through the actions of these damaged, ambitious, psychotic individuals, the author explores the power struggles and purges that ultimately (and thankfully) weakened the Wehrmacht and introduces the larger theme of the fluid nature of allies and enemies (familial, interpersonal, political, economic, etc.), with which the novel is primarily concerned.

It is through the powerful struggles that undid Röhm that Hermann’s father is transferred to the SS, and then the Gestapo, his viciousness and blind obedience multiplying to the point that his family ultimately implodes.

Through the family of Hermann’s friend Carla, we are introduced to myriad philosophical, artistic, and literary concerns for which Hermann is not yet ready. Carla’s family fares no better than his, as dangerous secrets and weakening alliances lead them to swim in a river of blood. It’s also through Carla’s family that superstitions, mythologies, and supernatural entities such as demons are explored (extending beyond the typical focus on only Nazi occultism), adding additional colored threads to the complex tapestry of Europe during World War II.

These higher-order concerns, along with the power of one’s imagination, are explored through the lenses of Corrupted, Coopted, and Pure, enlivening what might otherwise be your typical war-novel characters and bringing a well-covered subject into the realm of the exquisitely intimate through attention to individuals instead of nations. This is the alchemical necessity of compelling historical fiction.

As events move into 1938, with Hitler annexing Austria, the novel thematically explores love of country, family legacy, and the motivations, indoctrinations, and rationalizations of those who aid and abet Evil. Truth becomes increasingly malleable and illusive as Hermann navigates Paris and reunites with people from his past. As relationships and world events become steadily more complex, the absolute dichotomy of heroes and villains becomes untenable. There seem to be zero heroes. In a few short pages, a double tragedy abounds, out of nowhere, as is the way of senseless violence, the year culminating with Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938.

1940 and 1941 situate the novel in England at the time of the Luftwaffe blitz. This is not only the subject of the Larson book I’m reading, but a core element of the recent Peaky Blinders film. As Hermann is pulled into the world of espionage and codebreaking, the morality line blurs further. Who has the right to judge who’s worth saving and who’s left behind when refugees are referred to by the war’s supposed protagonists as “human debris”?

The protagonist’s time in London includes conversations in cafés between people from America, France, Russia, Germany, and England, encompassing the international scope of the war and allowing the author to fluidly weave metaphors and impressions into the story delivered through the lenses of painting, quantum physics, and philosophy, with politics and economics skewing each, as they do with all the novel’s themes. Dichotomies fuel the novel, with one of the most compelling being the nature of a god—is it something divine achieved through singing in the face of death or is it the power to give the order that precipitates that death?

While conversationalists ponder such propaganda fodder as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and intimations of the antisemitism that kept the US out of the war for far too long, Hitler is postulated to be “the transitory figurehead whom the true philosophers of fascism, hidden in the wings, need in these times. After the war, he will be replaced.” The same could be said of a certain “leader” in America as I write this.

1943 gives us a tale of Treblinka told to Allen Dulles, OSS Chief of European Operations. Van Laerhoven artfully navigates the complicated geopolitics of who knew what, who participated, the Catholic Church’s lack of intervention, and the gamesmanship involved in deciding when to make the existence of Treblinka and other concentration camps public. An extended section describing the inner workings of Treblinka is a highlight of the book, and sure to stir even the most jaded of hearts and souls. The corruption of science, psychology, and language (“processing,” “the treatment,” “units”) to increase the efficiency of what amounts to a foul, relentless Death Machine, from which the camp administrators also benefitted in material ways, should give every reader pause. Never before or since in history was efficiency such a sinister synonym for Evil.

In 1944, Hermann meets Carl Jung at a party. They go on to engage in several spontaneous therapy sessions, one of which occurs while they fish on Lake Lucerne. I could easily double the length of this review by exploring the myriad Jungian philosophy covered during their encounters. I’ll leave the discovery to you.

The novelist-philosopher Hermann Hesse was also at the party where Hermann met Jung. Synchronistically, I’d just finished rereading Steppenwolf, on which Van Laerhoven shares Hermann’s thoughts, including several quotes. The protagonist’s conversations with women are reminiscent of those of the Steppenwolf himself, Harry Haller.

The novel concludes in 1945, in the midst of mounting threats from Stalin (anticipating postwar postering and the fact that allies and enemies change, while global politico-economic gamesmanship goes on in different forms) and examination of the motivations behind the February bombing of Dresden—which, as a fitting conclusion to this review, are as contradictory and fluid as every theme and event with which this novel so nobly engages.