"Future civilisations - better civilisations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night
DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal response to the book. I can't forecast whether or not you'll like it yourself, not only because I'm terrible at recommendations as I always assume that people will like everything that I like. If you read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise for wasting your time, and ask you kindly to leave this blog and never return. (I'm kidding. But seriously: how can you not like Kurt Vonnegut?) Please don't get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think this book is a work of genius, but that's a matter of opinion.
If you want
to know me, here’s two facts: that was a terrible Bo Burnham reference, and I
love Kurt Vonnegut with the same force that lights the stars. (Third fact: that was a David Foster Wallace
reference. Is it plagiarism if you can admit to it?) I read what is arguably
Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, last Christmas, and have since
been yearning for more from the man who had fast become my favourite author. To
my surprise, the opportunity was quite literally handed to me, when I inherited
Vonnegut’s third novel, Mother
Night, from a teacher who I
overhead talking about Vonnegut and instantly gravitated towards. Thank God for
my nosy nature, because Mother
Night is brilliant. It’s the
fictional memoir of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright reluctantly
coerced into espionage who becomes one of the highest ranking Nazi officials of
World War II. His recount is being broadcast to us from a prison in Israel,
where he is preparing to testify for war crimes he unwillingly, albeit knowingly,
aided in, and is a
minefield of classic Vonnegut-isms: humour as black as the night, satire as
rich as honey, existentialism rife and bittersweet and biting cynicism
perfectly poised against fascinated humanism. Howard W. Campbell’s life asks
you the big question: what is a man’s life worth in the scheme of all things?
The answer, I’ve found, is not as easy to formulate as you might think.
Mother Night is a book about morals –
three of them, in fact. The first provides the basic scaffolding around
which the story is built and the remaining two are practically garbage at
surface level, but all three are, in typical Vonnegut fashion, not quite what
they appear. The first moral is, according to Campbell, “not a marvellous
moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we
must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Of course, this makes perfect
sense in the context of the novel – Campbell is literally pretending to be a
Nazi, so he must be careful lest he actually become one. Except, this is
Vonnegut, so it’s not that straightforward. He moves to Germany as a child and
has no interest in the growing political tensions there once he reaches
adulthood, but as Jonathan Sircy writes, “the war will not allow him to remain
neutral”. Campbell becomes a faux-fervent Nazi with a side project in taking
the Nazis down from the inside, and it’s all supposedly for the Greater Good;
but in doing so, Campbell becomes what he pretends to be – not to himself, but
to literally everyone else. Campbell famously dedicates his novel to himself,
“a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly,” and it’s true; as he
becomes a beloved icon for the German public, he becomes Public Enemy Number
One in the USA. His own people turn against him, not knowing that he is the
reason they’re gaining the upper hand, and it may or may not drive Campbell a
little bit insane in the end – how else would you expect him to handle it? At
one point, his father-in-law tells him this:
“’You
could never have served the enemy as well as you served us (…) I realised that
almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may
have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from
Himmler – but from you. You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone
insane.”
How
beautiful a phrase, how noble a sentiment, yet how terrible a thing to say.
Campbell knows that he’s on the same team as the ‘Good Guys,’ but no one else
is clued in. He’s on his own, so deeply rooted into his secret life that he
can’t escape it, ostracised and villainised despite the fact that beneath his
façade, Campbell is a creative, passionate, loving and thoughtful man, all
traits of a hero, not a villain. This matters not to the Americans the Israelis,
who want his head on a stick, but it matters to Campbell, and it matters to us.
Humans, I think, are set apart from animals not only by our opposable thumbs,
but also by our ability to self-identify. Our identity is who we are
fundamentally, the thing we most fear losing – and Campbell loses his somewhere
along the way. What’s Vonnegut trying to tell us with this? It’s a signal, I
believe, a warning to us all: if we pretend to be someone we’re not, we can
lose everything, including ourselves.
Is it worth
it, then? Is it worth sacrificing our selves in the name of the Greater Good? Mother Night’s second moral is
“When you’re dead you’re dead,” and although most people argue that the second
two morals are simple jokes with no connection to the story, but I don’t think
that’s how Vonnegut rolls. Campbell doesn’t officially die [spoiler redacted],
but metaphorically, Howard W. Campbell Jr. dies the moment he agrees to be a
U.S. counter-spy. A Nazi takes his place, and we never see Howard W. Campbell again,
at least not as the man he once was. Campbell’s super-secret intelligence work
was invaluable to the U.S. during the war, but the question still remains: was
it worth it? Was it worth losing everything, quite literally everything, to
save the world? In the big picture, none could say no, but Campbell isn’t
concerned with the big picture at this point. He’s concerned with the fact that
Howard W. Campbell is dead, and there’s nothing that he can do about it.
There’s a reason Campbell is a playwright: he likes to tell his own story,
write his own rules, but this is taken from him when he hands the Allies the
pen and lets them write the story for him. Again, I’ll ask: is it worth it?
Campbell hands over his life and he never gets its back, but he saved countless
lives in doing so. He loses his identity, is as metaphorically dead as dead can
be, and is America’s Most Wanted, but it was for a good cause, right? Vonnegut
poses this impossible question, the one that we simply cannot and will not
answer, and that is why I love him so. Campbell’s bitter cynicism, so potent
that it literally foreshadows Slaughterhouse-Five,
is a window into Vonnegut’s deep and poignant humanism. He can make you
question life and death and all the things in between; he can make you stop and
think and question, all the while making you giggle and gasp and grip at the
book with a stranglehold. What’s a man’s life worth, Vonnegut asks, in the
scheme of all things? The answer is inconclusive: everything, and nothing at
all. Yet somehow, Vonnegut makes this comforting. Mother Night is about morals so bleak that
they’re actually reassuring, and if that’s not the makings of a masterpiece, I
really don’t know what is.
TL;DR: I once met a man in a second-hand book shop who referred to
Kurt Vonnegut as 'the Master,' and frankly, I have never agreed with a complete
stranger more heartily in my life. Mother Night is
Vonnegut's third novel and is the second Vonnegut book I've read, but it's the
first book I've read this year that has truly blown me away. I call Kurt
Vonnegut my favourite author with good reason: he's a genius. He's a master
storyteller, a hilarious cynic, a champion of satire, and most importantly, he
gets the world (or at least, he got it - Godspeed, my beloved. So it
goes.). Mother Night is
inappropriately funny, quietly questioning, and unconventionally eloquent, and
like all Vonnegut literature, it made me stop. It made me think. It made me
listen to the world, as it was and as it is. Long story short: I love you, Kurt
Vonnegut, and I love Mother Night.
Maybe man will only remember you for the value of your art, but I will never
forget.
