I was slightly underwhelmed by The Dictator’s Muse. I enjoyed The Blasphemer very much but I didn’t think this had quite the same focus or impact.
I’m very cautious about reading novels about the Nazi era, but Leni Riefenstahl is an interesting and complex subject and I trusted Nigel Farndale to write a well researched and non-exploitative book about her. I was right in that the research and tone were good, but this book is only rather tangentially about Riefenstahl. She is a major character, but the real focus of the book is a tangled love triangle between Connie, an aristocratic woman, Kim, a working class athlete who is secretive about both his class and his Jewish roots and Alun, a passionate communist. These three become involved in the politics of the period leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Kim joins Moseley’s blackshirts because he needs their sponsorship to compete and Alun does the same to infiltrate and subvert the movement.
This dominates much of the novel, with Riefenstahl playing an important but not a central role. I was disappointed by this, especially as I found the fictional characters a little implausible; they’re certainly not stereotypes, but they do feel rather familiar and slightly artificial, as though they have been created specifically to illustrate the points which Farndale is making. He does have things to say about love, conflicts of loyalty, extremism and whether ends justify means, for example, but I wasn’t sure I was getting anything really new here. Add to this a slightly clunky structure of the 1936 action being framed by a 21st-Century researcher making some slightly implausible discoveries about Riefenstahl and the book wasn’t as insightful as I’d hoped.
On the plus side, Farndale writes well, the prose carries you along nicely, there are some very gripping scenes – a quietly terrifying visit from Heydrich, for example - and I did read to the end. It’s by no means a bad book and plenty of people will enjoy it, I suspect; it’s just that I’d hoped for more.
(My thanks to Doubleday for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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