"The Big Lie" by Julie Mayhew

[lizbee]

Blurb:

A shocking story of rebellion and revelation set in a contemporary Nazi England.

Jessika Keller is a good girl: she obeys her father, does her best to impress Herr Fisher at the Bund Deutscher Mädel meetings and is set to be a world champion ice skater. Her neighbour Clementine is not so submissive. Outspoken and radical, Clem is delectably dangerous and rebellious. And the regime has noticed. Jess cannot keep both her perfect life and her dearest friend. But which can she live without?

I inhaled this yesterday afternoon, and while I gave it four stars on GoodReads, I'm actually still trying to decide how I feel about it.



Here's a rough outline of the plot:

• Framing device one: Jessika speaks to someone -- possibly an American, certainly an outsider, someone who, she thinks, has been taught to question everything, to never be content -- about herself and the fact that she is, as the blurb says, a good girl -- albeit one who uses the word "fuck", because "I said I was good, I never said I was soft and sweet".
• Accordingly, I fall in love with Jessika in the fifth paragraph.
• Next scene: Jessika is questioned by a senior Nazi about her actions during a terrorist attack carried out by (we'll shortly learn) her best friend, Clementine Hart. The Nazi wants to know why she thinks Clementine did it; Jessika is ... unfamiliar with that level of independent and critical thought.
• Then the narrative begins properly, with an overview of Jessika's home (privileged) and her friendship with Clementine. They meet when Clem's family moves in next door to Jessika's, newcomers in an area reserved for the elite.
• Clementine's parents are somehow Not Quite The Thing -- they are overtly political, they ask questions, and Clementine's mother has a job, having been sterilised after giving birth to a defective son -- and Jessika tells us that sometimes, marginal families are permitted to live among the elite in the hopes that they will be improved by exposure to better people.
• Clementine tells Jessika she was named after "a beautiful lady". Specifically, she was named after Clementine Churchill, because the Harts are the most obvious revolutionaries ever (and the real reason they live next door to the Kellers is so that Jessika's dad can keep an eye on them).
• But seriously, they are not very good revolutionaries.
• ALSO, Jessika is in love with Clementine. Jessika is extremely gay. But Clementine's only love is THE REVOLUTION.
• Because the Harts are THE WORST REVOLUTIONARIES EVER, they openly criticise the Nazi leadership, and allow Clementine to leave the Bund Deutscher Mädel as soon as the new, more liberal Führer makes it optional. This is a deeply stupid move, because it means Clementine is immediately marked as Asocial (she is literally marked -- these are Nazis, there's a colour-coded triangle for that).
• Clementine also gets suspended from the Elite School when she writes an essay about how Nazis are bad.
• I mean, it's like the Harts want to be arrested!
• Also, apparently the British resistance is headquartered in Cornwall, and for some reason, I find this deeply hilarious.
• BUT I'M LOSING TRACK OF THE PLOT
• Okay, so the young folk are very into Illicit American Pop Music, which is passed around on contraband cassettes. But Jessika's dad told her that American music is literally poisoning its listeners, via radioactive particles in the tapes.
• She is a precious naive baby (who has not been raised with critical thinking skills) and wholeheartedly believes this, so IMAGINE HER PANIC when Clementine pulls out a CD and an illicit CD player!
• Apparently it's all part of the Harts' plan (to be the least secret revolutionaries in Nazi Britain) when their daughter shares her contraband with Jessika, who goes straight home and tells her dad everything.
• But her dad's already throwing a tantrum, because the New, Liberal Führer has invited the American pop singer of the moment to perform in England.
• And the local chapters of the Bund Deutscher Mädel and the Hitlerjugend have been selected to be his adorable totalitarian back-up dancers!
• Jessika pulls away from Clementine for a while, as she tries to figure out how to feign enthusiasm for a half-naked American boy whose pants don't even fit (he's blatantly modeled on Bieber, if you need a mental image), and also starts making out with the nice lesbian girl across the road.
• Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuntil her mother takes her to the doctor to have her "inappropriate attentions" corrected via hormone injections.
• This is terrible.
• Like, obviously I knew things were going to be horribly wrong the second Jessika kissed Clementine.
• But everyone needs a hug.
• Jessika finally brings this to an end by setting up a fake relationship with Herr Fisher, her group leader at the Bund Deutscher Mädel, who tried to have sex with her earlier in the book.
• (It was a terrible, clinical scene where Jessika was Too Naive For Words, and Fisher comes across as ... not so much a rapist or a predator, more like a very young man who doesn't come from a consent culture? Anyway, Fisher is not aware that this is a fake relationship, and I'm not all that sympathetic.)
• Jessika returns to Clem's side when she learns that a date has been set for Clementine's sterilisation. Because eugenics, obviously.
• Jessika takes a brief turn into Too Stupid To Live territory, thinking that a nice letter will dissuade the government from moving forward with that.
• ...other things are also happening with regard to Clementine's family: her dad is detained, her mother may or may not have had a breakdown, and meanwhile, Clem gives Jessika her notes for her school essay denouncing Nazism, and also a stack of contraband American magazines.
• The concert finally comes, and Jessika is exposed to Americans for the first time -- including women whom she assumes are secretaries, with "drawings on their arms" and profanity-laden complaints that the Nazis haven't set up the VPNs they were promised for their smartphones.
• (Clearly, Jessika thinks, the problem is that American computer technology is inferior to that of Nazi Europe.)
• (There's no language barrier because -- look, I could never figure out exactly what language the main characters are using, because it seems like Jessika and Clementine use German as the language of secrets, except that everyone speaks German -- but everyone speaks English, too. This is my main, ongoing point of confusion regarding this book.)
• Somehow, Clementine manages to get on stage, naked from the waist up with writing on her breasts, FEMEN style, and makes a statement before setting herself on fire.
• Acting automatically, Jessika grabs a jacket and covers her, attempting to put out the fire and save her BFF.
• Conveniently, the BDM just practised this the other day.
• So did everyone know that Clementine was going to do this? I wouldn't put it past the Worst Revolutionary Ever, but what was the purpose of letting it happen? To traumatise an American pop star? To see what Jess would do?
• We return to the scene at the beginning, of Jessika being questioned by a senior official.
• But now we also get a new framing device: alternating with scenes of Jessika becoming a Heroine of Nazi Britain ("the daughter of the nation"), she's put in solitary confinement and set to embark on a re-education program.
• I WAS CONFUSED.
• I mean, I'm very easily confused, but I feel like maybe we didn't need two framing devices?
• ANYWAY, Clementine is gone forever, probably dead, and Jessika is a heroine. The Nazi media pushes the line that she acted to save her friends, not one friend who happened to be the terrorist.
• Also, they blame the whole thing on a fictional Jewish American Communist Who Was Manipulated By Black People.
• I really liked the whole Jessika-as-Heroine section for how it highlights the gaslighting that goes into maintaining a totalitarian regime. There's a bit where her family watches a documentary about Great Nazi Technology, and Jess's sister points to a laptop and says, "You have one of those, Daddy!" And the father says, "No, I don't." And that's it, even though everyone has seen him using a laptop. The end.
• It helps, too, that in this section, Jessika finally has some clues -- not many clues, but enough that she is not entirely a naive newborn baby.
• And she hooks up with her girlfriend again, which is nice.
• Right up until she creates a bunch of posters revealing the truth about Clementine, only to discover that (of course) she's been under surveillance all along, and her room has been searched, and her copies of Clementine's essay and contraband magazines have vanished.
• I was like, girl, what did you think would happen?
• In fairness, though, she was mentored by the daughter of the WORST REVOLUTIONARIES, I guess we're lucky she made it this far.
• Cue the re-education camp framing device, and the discovery that her father authorised it himself.
• I wish her father had been a better character, because he's DISTANT and OMINOUS but not really present?
• In the final chapters, Jessika is deemed "re-educated" and permitted a small amount of freedom in the form of a new identity and a husband.
• And she's like, "Well, that could have gone a lot worse." Which is fair! And fits the story better than her suddenly escaping to America with a miraculously unhurt and alive Clementine ... but, you know. It's bittersweet like a kick in the guts, but then, it's meant to be.
• But there's still the framing device where she's telling this whole story to an outsider, and I'm like, DID YOU GET TO HOLIDAY IN CORNWALL WITH THE RESISTANCE? IS THAT WHAT THIS IS?
• I feel like I may have genuinely missed something, because the book is downright opaque in parts.
• Like, Jessika eventually figures out that her whole relationship with Clementine was engineered by the state so she could spy on the Harts (even though they are literally going around the neighbourhood talking shit about Nazism), but why were the Harts given so much freedom in the first place?
• I've read a fair amount of non-fiction about life under totalitarian regimes, it involves remarkably few garden parties where guests openly criticise the government.

Conclusion: this was totally compelling, and not at all a bad read, but I have questions.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

Ever since I read stuff about how unlikely it was that Operation Sealion would have worked, I feel that simple "the Third Reich conquered Britain" stories are letting British culture off too easily. I think if you are doing "post-WWII fascist Britain" you should be doing an alternate history where Britain actually did turn fascist in the 1930s and was allied with Germany.

[lizbee]

Yeah, I was expecting shenanigans with the Moseleys, and Edward VIII having been a Nazi puppet king, and maybe Enoch Powell as PM.

[https://me.yahoo.com/a/6X3.fZ44wPTF9EOV.7riec2775py73rJJHQdOl6ztdpU_5mbSwmlw2BjeKBh.MbdK_sriTY-#6ee45]

that's why i hated Timewyrm: Exdodus as PM Mosley and King Edward and Queen Wallis are so cliche in WI the Nazis won? stories

[sabotabby]

I feel like Farthing by Jo Walton did a pretty good job of it.

[mystefaction]

The idea of a League of "Deutscher" Maidens, in Britain, even a bilingual Britain under Nazi rule, is twisting my head up a bit.

[lizbee]

Right? I felt like it couldn't quite settle on whether this culture is German or British -- food, given names, songs are all German, but the characters speak like contemporary middle class English kids from a Channel 4 drama.

[branwyn]

ok now I really can't wait for you to see the Man in the High Castle. We can compare notes about Nazi AUs and what makes them believable or not!

[lizbee]

Does The Man in the High Castle feature really blatant subversion that passes largely without comment?

[branwyn]

No, if anything, I find it implausible in the opposite direction. For instance, there is literally no reason why the Bible should be banned in the Reich and the Neutral Zone, nor does it make sense that all social rituals like funerals and weddings are conducted with secular Nazi rituals.

The Pacific States might quite possibly restrict sales of the Bible, since Christianity is a western encroachment and they depict the Japanese as extremely traditional. But the existence of the Bible was never seen as a threat to the Nazi regime, and inferring that it would be is pure American sentimentalism.

Obviously Hitler was cuckoo over the occult, but Christianity is an extremely important part of German heritage--the first reich was literally the Holy Roman Empire, not to mention Germany being the birthplace of Lutheranism. That sort of cultural continuity was really important to the Nazis. I believe there were long term plans to edge out the primacy of religion and replacing it with state ideology, but that would never happen in less than a generation after the end of the war.

Actually, all my biggest complaints with the series is that >20 years after the Axis victory is much, much too short a time for such sweeping, uniform social changes to take place in the US. Nuclear bomb or no nuclear bomb, you cannot subdue that much geographical territory in that space of time, especially when you're dealing with terrain like mountains and wilderness. They sort of nod towards that by making the Rocky Mountains the neutral zone, but if Phillip K Dick thought the Nazis were gonna subdue Appalachia in 15 years, he was clearly lacking in imagination.

It's like what you were saying in another comment about how contemporary Nazi Britain would make much more sense if Britain had just gone fascist in the 30s. There is no historical scenario in which Nazi Germany conquering all of the US and western/central Europe makes sense. I would also argue that there's no way Hitler stayed in power until the 60's, but I guess a Nazi AU is no fun without Hitler? Or something?

[sgac]

Belated, but I was inspired to read this book specifically so I could speak to your comment.

So, the Kellers live in a gated? suburb set up for high-ish level people. And right next door to Keller, who is basically Gestapo, is a house set aside for revolutionaries with a child the same age as Keller's. This is so he can keep an eye on the revolutionaries, but I suspect also so the elites can be exposed to the idea of the enemy is amongst you. Look - the Harts across the road are revolutionaries. If they are, so might lots of other people. You should inform on anyone you suspect. But don't worry about the Harts, because Herr Keller is looking after that.

Because a totalitarian society can't function without an enemy. It needs its pet revolutionaries. They're useful to provide an example to others. The Harts don't need to be very good revolutionaries. They're serving a purpose right where they are with all their incompetence hanging out, showing people what to look for.

Of course it would have been nice if Clementine had been able to be reformed through her friendship with Jessika. But that didn't happen. So let her go out in a blaze of glory that will eliminate her and totally serve our purposes - letting American pop music in doesn't work, see how it attracted trouble.

Unfortunate that Jessika was corrupted by her contact with Clementine, but it's easy to disappear her.