Bomber

Product Information

It is clear that, opposite of Steinbeck, Deighton tries to convey that war sucks, and nothing sucks more than the randomness of area bombing. A ‘must’ for the legions of Len Deighton fans, this edition of Bomber from Grove Press is highly recommended for personal and community library World War II fiction collections. In its depictions of the mechanics of aerial combat and military aviation, it is as meticulous and detailed as a work of history. Reader's Digest Condensed Books Halic, Time and Again,Six-Horse Hitch, Bomber, A Woman in the House (Reader's Digest Condensed Books, Vol. Four decades ago, probably the most precise novel dealing with the air war over Germany was Len Deighton’s BOMBER.

August Bach, for example, the Luftwaffe radar officer, begins a tepid love affair with his child’s nanny, Anna-Luisa.

A highly decorated World War I veteran who voluntarily serves as a lower-ranked officer away from the front lines, he is a widower with an older son on the Eastern front.

For Deighton the RAF is as class-ridden as the Bullingdon Society (Harry Palmer, the prole MI5 agent in The Ipcress File, makes the same Deightonish point). Original unclipped dust wrapper is also smart with light shelf wear and minor chipping to the extremities. Deighton brings home to the reader just how much sheer luck influenced which crews survived, and which perished. As for his writing, it's smooth as always, but the glibness he displays in his spy novels here becomes an unsettling detachment as he describes the dismemberment, disembowelment, and disintegration of characters with whom the reader has just spent the last several hundred pages. I make a point of visiting Harris’s statue every time I’m in London, just to remind myself what arrogance and venality look like.

Immediately afterwards I was determined to find a better, more realistic book, but it is not a topic that attracts good authors.

What makes Deighton unique, though, is his being a single voice in describing both sides of the story. Len Deighton—one of the masters of twentieth-century espionage fiction—combines his expertise as both historian and novelist in Bomber, the classic World War II novel that relates, in devastating detail, the twenty-four-hour story of an allied bombing raid.

The first chapter in particular has some really terrible, clunking dialogue, and the mechanics of introducing his large cast of characters are not well handled. On the other hand, the experience and reaction of ordinary townspeople to being bombed by seven hundred aircraft will surely never again be portrayed in all of its forensic horror like Deighton has done here. At present living in Europe, he has, over the years, lived with his family in ten different countries from Austria to Portugal.

He introduces us to the men (and a handful of women) in a single RAF Bomber Command squadron, with a focus on the men of one crew who fly a Lancaster bomber. Deighton highlights in great detail the respective preparations of the RAF attackers, and the Luftwaffe crews intent on defence. Len Deighton’s devastating novel is a gripping minute-by-minute account of what happens over the next twenty-four hours. Despite the attack completely missing its industrial target no one is punished for the failure, but Himmel and Lambert are executed and demoted, respectively, for non-combat reasons.Deighton brings the story up to date (at the time of writing) and the fates of those who survived 1943 are vividly captured in the most evocative and sparing writing style of all.