Two years after the publication of 'A Prophet Without Honor', it might be safe to risk a little controversy and discuss the political parable I had in mind in writing the novel.
Back in 2003, during the buildup to the Iraq War, I happened to be reading a collection of pieces of journalism published in the magazine The New Yorker, during the Second World War, extended essays from this city or that. The 'Letter from Paris' and 'Letter from London' written in May of 1940 were particularly striking. The authors were genuinely afraid, terrified, and the emotion seeps through the elegant prose. Hitler and the Nazis seemed unstoppable. (Churchill was not yet Prime Minister and there was a real possibility the British would seek a negotiated peace and abandon the Continent.) There was an agony of recrimination. How had they let the monster grow to this degree of power? What had they been thinking? You can't buy this kind of genuine emotion in any history. It's priceless.
But these were the very same people who would have been most opposed to action against Germany when it was actually practical, 1938 or particularly 1936. They would have opposed it in the snarky manner characteristic of urban intellectuals, with that maddening complacency that sneers away any contrary point of view. (I have my prejudices).
The Iraq War began, which I did not support for my own reasons. But it wasn't long before the predictable narrowing of thought commenced. The Iraq War Was The Greatest Mistake In The History Of American Foreign Policy (an absurd exaggeration on its own terms), and no two ways of thinking about it. It has been thus for the last few centuries, since the salons of Paris in the French Revolution - urbane, cynical, and short-sighted, the same as it always is, except for the powdered wigs.
Well . . . . I am allergic to complacent, narrow thought by nature, and philosophically trained in the bargain - meaning I am more interested in the the questions posed on a subject than the answers given to them. Pertaining to Iraq, the salonists weren't even asking the right question. You don't evaluate a given course of action as large and multifaceted as Iraq simply by describing the negative consequences that have ensued. You have somehow to compare the world that arose as a result, with the world that would have arisen had the course of action not taken place. That comparison has of necessity to be intuitive, so moral certainty is impossible. This frustrates salonists, whose complacency is based on the illusion of certainty. Since there is no rational rejoinder, they respond with ridicule and exclusion. I thought of those old New Yorker pieces. Had the Iraq invasion never happened, had Hussein remained in power, it is easy to envision any number of time streams in which our contemporary intellectuals ended up as scared and regretful as the ones in 1940. But no one will ever, can ever, know.
Years passed, and in 2012 I had considerable success in the Kindle Selects program, selling over 30,000 copies of three novellas I had written long before there was a market for them. (They're still there, by the way - pleasant, easy reads at $0.99 each - https://amzn.to/2KgfnBr - this is a promotional page, after all.) This encouraged me, and I looked around for a subject for a novel. I thought of my decade long frustration and decided to write it up. 'A Prophet Without Honor' was the result.
That was not to say the novel wrote itself. There was an enormous amount of research, including a trip to Munich in 2013, during which I walked over the route of the Beer Hall Putsch (1923) and visited the site of the Night of the Long Knives (1934). (Those two scenes in the novel are written from life, and I am quite pleased with them.) I chose the epistolary form because I had always admired it, and wanted to try my hand. My hope is that the result is an engrossing yarn, with considerable suspense, romance, and the requisite quantum of violence appropriate to a novel about Nazis. I believe it is a hugely entertaining read.
But in the larger sense, the book is about the the 'little, nameless, unremembered'* acts of moral decency that might have saved the world, or even created the world, unknown and unknowable, forever lost in the might-have-been, and the unknown heroes who are prophets without honor in this, the land that has come to be. It's about the fragility of historical processes, how little certainty there can ever be about the actions and forces that have produced the world as it is. In the universe of the novel, Karl von Haydenreich is not celebrated as the man who saved the world, because no one ever finds out that the world needed saving. Instead, he becomes controversial, disputed - and his young wife mourns his sacrifice in sorrow and anger as completely unnecessary. There is no way she could know better.
This, then, is the parable, a caution against judgment and complacency - a rebuttal to salonism, if you will. As to history, and even more current events, we see through a mirror darkly - a crazyhouse mirror, at that. A little recognition of the essential fragility and fallibility of the process goes a long way.
* Quoting from Wordsworth's 'Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey' - a marvellous poem that has been with me my entire adult life. The full text is here - http://bit.ly/332K1XO