The Lesser Evil?
A novel about time travel and the Holocaust? How do you pull that off?
In the case of Days of Cain (probably the only such case), superbly.
The author, J.R. Dunn, has, to my knowledge, written only two other SF novels. I’ve read This Side of Judgment, which is good enough but nothing to get wildly excited about. I got wildly enough excited by Days of Cain, long out of print (released by Avon in 1997), that I scoured the Internet and bought 14 copies which I distributed to everyone I could think of who might be interested.
As I have to admit, many of them (including a published SF author) never responded with massive enthusiasm. Yet this doesn’t faze my own enthusiasm a bit. Both my wife (one of the most serenely intelligent beings on earth) and I felt we had wended our way through one of the finest explications of time travel written and one of the most telling and devastating unveilings of the Holocaust—one that puts Sophie’s Choice to shame.
Somewhere at or near the end of time dwell The Moiety, beings of unsurpassed but inexplicable wisdom who have established The Extension, an organization outside time whose mandate is to prevent the altering of human history. For every now and then, independent idealists and rogue time twisters feel that history would be better off if events were manipulated/massaged to correct humanity’s inevitable mistakes. (The Moiety’s abstracted reasoning simply has to be accepted by The Extension without explanation—sounds clunky, but Dunn handles that surprisingly well).
This general kind of thing has been done before (Fritz Leiber’s “The Big Time” stories, for example), but never in quite the same way. There’s lots of fomenting action, but the basic construct of The Extension is a scurry of intelligence—not of the CIA variety, but the use of thoughtful mind as determinant. It’s us against them—even when "them” are turncoat “us"—in a mental tug of war to see who can undermine, pre-figure or post-concept whom.
The central character at The Extension, Gaspar James, has years on the job; he’s solid, he knows, he can handle it all, with occasional questioning that he shoves under the mantle. What he’s pitted against now is a temporal insurrection led by Alma Lewin, his most accomplished protégé.
This is where Days of Cain veers off into a kind of fantasy that encapsulates and expands on reality. Alma and her cohorts see the Holocaust as evil of such unprecedented depths and extent that it can warp, if not eviscerate, the future (echoes, perhaps, of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, but with deeper insight). Her band decides, initially, to assassinate Hitler during World War I, but their attempt leads only to his hysterical blindness (a true, documented condition of Der Pre-Fuehrer). Extension teams, by various means, aided by circumstance, thwart this and similar attempts. What’s left, in Alma’s eyes? To annihilate, obliterate the horror of Auschwitz.
If the book went on from there to a rootin’-tootin’, rip-‘em-up run round the bases of Nazi atrocity, it would not only fail but become ludicrous. Dunn (who seems these days to be mostly a political commentator) instead steps inside the physicality of Auschwitz and the psychicality of both prisoners and keepers. The scenes of the concentration camp are harrowing, gut-wrenching, almost sickening—but not gratuitous. They maintain a steady beat that reads evil, evil, evil yet leaves the tantalizing possibility of… could it have been made otherwise?
Alma deliberately and personally infiltrates the camp, both to organize a potential uprising and to direct what she hopes/expects to be its explosive liberation by her colleagues. Gaspar’s job is to thwart what he can’t help seeing as a principled and morally right attempt at revisionism. The result, for him, is success—at the price of something close to mental dissolution.
When I first read the time-attack on Auschwitz by Alma’s legion (spoiler here, I guess, but it makes no never-mind really—that’s the difference between a pretty good and a truly wonderful book), I wondered why Gaspar stayed so long during the almost-successful gunshipping of the concentration camp—long enough to be a hair-trigger away from temporal evaporation before he leads his own team to their sanctioned "victory.” Later, I realized that Gaspar had to watch Auschwitz be destroyed for the moment, even if he, in his hideous necessity, must later reverse it.
I’ve been an SF/fantasy fan for over 60 years, since I first plowed through my elder brother’s collection of Famous Fantastic Mysteries from the ‘40s (themselves reprints of A. Merritt and other much earlier authors). Of all I’ve read, no single book in the “genre,” whatever that may encompass, has affected me so deeply, so continuingly, so commandingly.
Find it. Read it.
by Derek Davis