Review: 'Daddy' by Loup Durand

Daddy by Loup Durand

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This amazing novel has been on my bookshelf for years, one of Mr B's all-time favourites but unread by me because I had myself down as 'someone who doesn't go for WWII fiction'. But lock down has closed the libraries and sent me casting around for reading material, and boy am I glad that I finally got round to this!

The plot is actually relatively simple: The year is 1942. The location is occupied France. Thomas Van Gall, an eleven-year-old boy, has locked away in his memory the codes to over 350 million dollars, secreted away in multiple bank accounts for Jewish clients by his late grandfather. The only other person who holds this information is his mother, Maria Weber, a brilliant and wealthy former socialite, now being hunted by the Nazis. Leading the search for the missing millions is obsessive, wily, intelligent Gestapo agent Gregor Laemmle. Laemmle, a paedophile, has hitherto been unaware of Thomas' existence, let alone his extraordinary mental capacity and the fact that he shares his mother's secret knowledge – but all that is about to change.
Anticipating her own demise, Maria has instilled into her son's memory a series of instructions to be followed in the event of just such a discovery, and appointed crack marksmen, survival experts and safe houses to guard and guide her son to safety in Switzerland where he will finally be able to divulge the list he has memorised; she has also written a letter to an old lover, unsuspecting American banker David Quartermain, informing him that he has a son who is in mortal danger.

And so, as Sherlock Holmes would say, the game is afoot. The cat-and-mouse dance is long and complicated, as three minds try to second-guess one another and stay half a step ahead. At one point, Thomas is captured by Laemmle and challenges him to a game of chess – a game he could easily have won in a few moves, but as a test of the older man's capacities he draws it out for as long as possible before announcing the final 'Check'. This game comes to symbolise the whole complex relationship between man and boy. Meanwhile Quartermain, initially dismissed by his estranged son as just another pawn to be sacrificed in the cause of the greater good, gradually moves to centre stage as his journey of self-discovery leads him to cross inner boundaries as well as the borders and checkpoints of occupied Europe.

Actually for me it's Quartermain who makes the most shocking discovery of the story, a series of facts coolly embedded in the fictional narrative: namely, the activities of American banks and businessmen determined to make a profit out of WWII no matter which side won. I had no idea, for instance, that the Yanks were complicit in financing the manufacture of Zyklon B (the gas used in extermination camps such as Auschwitz); that American oil companies supplied the Nazis with aviation fuel; or that Hitler's rise to power was largely financed and maintained during the 1930s by Wall Street bankers. Obviously it wasn't just American financiers who turned a blind eye to the repercussions of their business deals, but considering the retrospective self-congratulation on 'winning the war' still paraded on occasion by the US, and the heavy wartime cost to Britain of persuading the Yanks to join the Allies at all, I found this information every bit as sickening and disillusioning as Quartermain does!

Anyway, I won't spoil the ending, but trust me, it's heartbreaking and well worth waiting for. For me, 'Daddy' merits a rare five-star score.



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