The Splendid and the Vile

Erik Larson is my favorite non-fiction author and while he doesn't turn in his best work here (I still think Devil in the White City is superior), this book is still a good read. Larson excels at writing non-fiction in a fiction style, shaping his narrative off of Vonnegut's “Man in the Hole” story arcs (where the main character “experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success”). Where this book lacks however is in the subject. Churchill has been written about so much that it is challenging to find something new to share and Larson acknowledges this in the Sources and Acknowledgements chapter at the end of the book, saying “One danger in writing about Churchill is that you'll become overwhelmed at the very start [...] by the sheer volume of work already in the public domain.” But what Larson does to counteract this is to focus on a short-window, the first year of his Prime Minister-ship and he gives space for small moments of humanity. Some of my favorite moments were the love stories between minor characters in the midst of terrible bombing raids. Larson says this eloquently saying “I tried also to bring to the foreground characters often given secondary treatment in the big histories. Every Churchill scholar has quoted the diaries of John Colville, but it seemed to me that Colville wanted to be a character in his own right, so I tried to oblige him. I know of no other work that mentions his bittersweet romantic obsession with Gay Margesson [...] [Scholars] dismissed these and other omissions as ‘trivial entries which are of no general interest.' At the time he actually made them, however, the events at hand were anything but trivial. What I found so interesting about his pursuit of Gay was that it unfolded while London was aflame, with bombs falling every day, and somehow the two of them managed to carve out moments of, as he put it, ‘sufficient bliss'”. This is where all of Larson's works excel - in creating space and time to recognize small moments of humanity in the midst of larger-than-life historical events. You can feel like you were there because he slows down time and allows for the real moments of life to spill in (just because a war is on, regular life doesn't come to a complete halt, like so history books seem to imply). I just found that there were ultimately too few of these moments to make this as great as his other works. All in all, Larson's writing still excels and this novel is worth reading not only for the moments of humanity he presents but also the displays of leadership he explains. Churchill really seemed like the right leader at the right time and it made me wonder what our current crisis would be like under different leadership.