“We become like the river reflected, both light and dark. Struggling artist Sylvia is offered an unusual commission by the mysterious Victor, acting on behalf of a secret sponsor, who wants to engage her for a year to produce art depicting the Holocaust. She accepts the project on trust and discovers an enigmatic thirteen-year-old girl Nina, who becomes her model and pupil.As the months pass, Sylvia begins to unravel the truth about Victor, the secret sponsor and Nina, while unearthing more about history and identity than she was ever prepared for. A family drama that champions the structures and beliefs that underpin a civilised society, The River Reflects faces the darkest shadows of human nature. With the Thames winding relentlessly through this compelling story, Sylvia, Victor, Nina and those around them progress from fear and isolation to seek love and fortitude and the redemptive power of the human spirit.’
I have quite a collection of Holocaust books. Both fiction and fact. Why would you? That’s the question many people ask. Sometimes I ask myself the same question. I think it’s because I have an overwhelming conviction that the only way to prevent such a thing happening again is to keep it out there, in the wider consciousness. To not shy away from the subject. Every year I acknowledge Holocaust Memorial Day and I try to draw others attention to it.
Not surprisingly then I am drawn to books that are to do with the Holocaust. So I jumped at the chance to hop aboard the blog tour for Mark Godfrey’s The River Reflects. I found it completely absorbing and completely in sync with my convictions.
Mr Godfrey has plotted and composed an intriguing fiction, a kind of cerebral whodunnit, it if you like, and woven into it, a potted history of the Holocaust. It’s clever. Cunning even. It’s almost as if the writer is saying if you wanna read the story and find out what happens then you also have to learn about the Holocaust.
But the book also has something to say about art, the artist, creativity, whether an artist has any kind of responsibility? Our artist, Sylvia, ponders the morality of what she’s doing.
‘Knowing the Nazis were evil is one thing, but using that knowledge to create something that is relevant today feels like a task forged in the picture of the Earth as a punishment.‘
The book to looks at considerations of how the Holocaust happened. How Nazis were free to pursue such an evil intent.
‘The terrible thing is when compliance becomes complicity. Hitler could have been stopped, but at a critical turning point, probably 1933 when he was invited into power by an old guard who thought they could contain him, he gained a momentum that would prove unstoppable right through until he killed himself in his bunker. The deaths of millions would for decades scrape at the conscience of those who survived.’
But there are some perceptions regarding our contemporary world that are actually quite chilling.
One of the characters, Victor, offers some considerations for us to contemplate.
‘Ignorance breeds stupidity breeds violence. Propaganda exploits ignorance and amplifies it. The Nazis were the masters, but open a newspaper switch or switch on the radio or watch a news programme and you’ll find the same traits, the same DNA, the same search for the “story“, for someone to “blame“, for someone to funnel hate towards.‘
Sylvia herself has some insights.
‘ The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.‘
And pinning it all together is the symbol of the river. A river, any river? It matters not. Its significance is perhaps best summed up by one of the characters in the book, Sylvia’s husband, Alex.
“It’s never the same water, never the same molecules; they flow past and are gone, the river has no memory..... but for those of us in its reach it helps in both remembering and forgetting.“
One of life‘s paradoxes maybe. The yin and yang that pervades so much of our world. The paradox endures throughout the book with a footing firmly in our contemporary world but requiring that we return to a past that we may want to forget but that should never be forgotten.
The research is detailed and accurate, it certainly reinforces much of the material I’ve seen and read regarding those heinous events of the Second World War. The characters are diverse, multi faceted and the plot is nicely twisted and turned to keep the interest of those readers who may not be reading the book for its genocide theme.
Whilst one couldn’t describe it as an action packed novel there are some sequences that are tense and suspenseful and the climax at the end of the book is a master stroke and completely unexpected. And it mirrors so perfectly events from the past. I found myself quite stunned.
It’s one of those books that will stay with you for sometime after you finish it and so it should. It should stay with you forever actually!
My thanks to Kelly Lacey and the Love Books group for an opportunity to read it and have a place upon the blog tour. My opinion is but one of many. Do please check out what other bloggers have to say about this book.
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