The Road to Ithaca (Martin Bora)

I like this one better than the previous installment, “Tin Sky”. That one dragged. This one is more compact and moves right along.The previous story took place in Ukraine and Russia in spring 1943 after Stalingrad. Now we jump back in time two years to spring 1941, just before Operation Barbarossa. The Nazis and the Communists, having split up Poland, are still pals. (Pastor’s layout of all this across the series is less than linear, but as this transcends genre writing to become literature, she is forgiven.)Bora, stationed with the Abwehr at Germany’s Moscow embassy, is dispatched to the just-conquered Greek island of Crete on a weirdly trivial errand: to bring back 5 cases of Cretan wine for Russia’s third most powerful man. The much feared Lavrenti Beria controls the secret police, everyone fears him, and diplomats want to stay on his good side.Germany’s invasion of Russia is a few weeks off but Bora is among those privileged to know.As he gets to Crete the Abwehr chief there suddenly diverts him to a sensitive matter: the accusation, backed up by photos, that German paratroopers committed a war crime, murdering an intellectual and his household members. The dead man is a friend of Himmler.Bora is isolated. The paras, the chief of whom is Bora’s boyhood rival from East Prussia, obviously resent him. The Greeks hate any German. Can Bora trust the Greek police inspector detailed to work with him?Rather than being war or spy genre, the Martin Bora stories are murder mysteries set against a war and spy backdrop. I’ve grappled with why Bora finds himself playing detective, since it’s not always clear and never part of his job description. Pastor usually conjures up some interdepartmental tension that explains both why he’s on it and why he’s always a Man Alone.Here, I get it: the Abwehr, foreign intelligence, must investigate first, before the Red Cross gets there, to determine what really happened so the German government knows how to play it. Plus they need to know where everyone stands in the intramural conflict with Himmler.Are the paras guilty? They’re aggressive, trained killers newly arrived on a hard-case island undergoing violent pacification.There are others who could have done it, and the photographic evidence, while suggestive, isn’t conclusive.The victim had other enemies, including a neighbor with violent tendencies. And maybe there’s a dispute over a Jewish woman. And the victim’s fey personal habits and taste for beautiful young men earned him enmity from deeply traditional Cretans. His racial research for Himmler earned more from others. The ex-pat archaeologists who form their own clique on the island have all kinds of rivalries.In Crete, boys learn to shoot around the time they learn to walk. Vendettas fester. Habits surrounding women are more Muslim and Oriental than Christian and European. Honor killings still exist. Superstitions dominate the handling of the dead. The island has its own internal animosities outsiders can barely grasp. Even the Communist partisans there are split into two factions who loathe each other.The Germans haven’t really conquered this island and you sense they never will. It’s too wild and rugged, the resistance too implacable.Bora must consider it all while working against the clock of the Red Cross arrival. (And the deadline for Beria’s wine. He’s throwing a party!) The investigation opens a rat’s nest of intrigue, perversion and espionage. Bora finds himself even more isolated when the Abwehr chief directing his work and steering him around the area is suddenly recalled, leaving Bora alone in this violent occupied country.The classically educated Bora finds, particularly during his perilous journey into the interior in search of a missing witness, parallels between his journey and that of Odysseus. The latter sought to get home to Ithaka. Bora’s thoughts turn frequently to his own childhood home in East Prussia, and to his gorgeous and amorous wife Dikta, who we know from an earlier story set later in the war, will eventually and painfully dump him. His passages with her tie him in more closely to the wanderings and torments of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, afraid to go home because his wife is having an affair. (It’s a book the Nazis have banned because the main character is Jewish.) Late in the story Bora, who flouts the Nazis and picks up a German translation in a Moscow used book store, reads the novel’s famous last line.I’m getting a better feel for Bora’s character in this fifth book. I find him an intriguing character, refreshing as a German World War II character difficult to peg or pigeonhole, and thus more subtle and interesting than some white-hat or black-hat figure. I’m glad I stuck with this series. It’s difficult at times but rewarding.We’ve known all along of his aristocratic background and refined upbringing. Here some things come into sharper focus. His childhood conflict with Waldo Preger, now the German para leader under suspicion, reveals the class tensions beneath, and the different paths each has followed through the Third Reich as a result. Preger is the son of the gamekeeper on Bora’s family estate. It’s this class conflict that encapsulates why and how Bora fights alongside Nazis - but isn’t one. Readers of history know the Abwehr was the least Nazified branch of the Third Reich. And we need to recall the “socialism” side of “national socialism”. Preger represents working-class people who see a Nazi revolution as overthrowing the wealthy elites who have lorded it over people like him.We see more what motivates Bora. He’s inherited his father’s artistic bent, but followed his stepfather’s profession by choosing to become a warrior. He fought in Spain and looks forward eagerly to the upcoming invasion of Russia because that’s what warriors do. Not being a Nazi, he, in each story someplace, helps someone Jewish, or looks the other way when that’s what’s needed to save them.But he has not conspired against the Third Reich. His quests are dispassionate quests for the truth in the charnel house of a vicious war where hardly anyone cares about the truth.Looking ahead, with the seventh and final installment tied to von Stauffenberg’s assassination plot against Hitler, I gather Pastor will address Bora’s to-be-or-not-to-be position regarding the Nazis more squarely, and his fate as the war draws to a close.We know that Bora’s own Ithaka - the family estate in East Prussia - will vanish from the German world the Nazis lose and Germans are expelled from Eastern lands where they had lived for a thousand years. I’m revved up and ready to read the last two books, the sixth one jumping back to his fighting in Spain in 1937 (and his affair there with the haunting Remedios, before his marriage), and the last one as noted.I wonder, will he run across Dikta one last time? Will she come back to him late in the war like Molly does to Leopold Bloom?

"The Road to Ithaca" is something of a departure for the Martin Bora series. It is still a work of historic fiction--WWII with a German perspective--but the author uses Homer's "Ulysses" as the basic structure and model for characters in this story of a Wehrmacht counter-intelligence officer (Bora) on mission in 1941 Crete, Bora, the Junker aristocrat is, at this stage of the war, still a whole-hearted, if conflicted patriot, dedicated to service to the fatherland, if not to the Nazi leadership. In "The Road..." he takes on the role of Ulysses as he attempts to complete the investigation of a massacre that took place during the German invasion of Crete. In one form or another, Bora faces all of the challenges that barred the original wanderer from reaching home in Homer's epic. Bora's character is no less complex than his role model's, but he is even more the moral man thrust into immoral service than ever. The contradictions that he lives with daily wear heavy. Interwoven into the Ulysses structure is a very smart storyline of professional rivalries and espionage skullduggery.Bora's complicated character, with its frequent internal conversations, is front in center in the story, but there is also plenty of action and a wonderful rendition of the geographic setting. While author Pastor's writing is generally denser and more layered, there are frequent glimpses of Hemingway in this novel that are not forced or artificial, but certainly remind the reader of "For Whom the Bell Tolls and "A Farewell to Arms".Followers of the wonderful Martin Boris series, will find that this novel is a switchback in time for the protagonist, whose earlier activities have taken him up to late 1944 and maybe a bit beyond. If you have read any of the later books, you will know that aspects of Bora's personal life have already evolved or resolved, and that he will experience great hardship and loss beyond this Cretan adventure. Readers of Phillip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books will appreciate how this can add and detract from the book at hand.Altogether, this is a highly agreeable read with satisfying challenge for the reader.

I've read all of Ben Pastor's Martin Bora novels with the exception of the first one as the plot didn't interest me. "The Road to Ithaca" was a struggle for me to get through compared to the other books. Instead of picking up where the last one ("Tin Sky") left off in 1944 with Bora as a Wermacht Major he's back to being a Captain and it's 1941. Bora's a counterintelligence officer in the Abwehr (military intelligence) assigned as a general's aide in Moscow two weeks before Operation Barbarossa kicks off. Somehow he lands the ridiculous task of being dispatched to Crete (on the heels of the Reich's invasion of the island) to procure some cases of wine for NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria. Once there he's derailed on another task to investigate the murder of a Swiss researcher who works for SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. This new mission launches him on a long, drawn out search of the island for a key witness with the author attempting to make Bora's trials parallel those of Homer's "Ulysses"...it got old very fast. If I wanted to take an English lit seminar I'd sign up for one at the local college. Also, Bora is even more introspective than usual here and dwells repeatedly on some old chlildhood incident when he was 12 with the son of their country estate's caretaker who is now a Fallschirmjager (paratrooper) on Crete. This navel gazing goes on and on and does little to advance the story and just fills pages. Things eventually get sorted out and Bora even scores some choice wine before making it back to Moscow. Definitely not as good as the previous books in this series and I'll have to think twice about reading another.

Ben Pastor has written five novels about Wehrmacht officer Martin von Bora and his adventures in World War II. "The Road to Ithaca" is the second in chronological order after "Lumen" and deals with events on Crete in June 1941. That date is significant because it occurs just as German troops are consolidating the island after a bloody conquest and just before Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of Germany. Von Bora is summoned from his military attaché posting in Moscow and sent to Crete to round up vintage bottles of the local wine as a gift to Stalin's secret police chief. While there he is tasked with investigating what appears to be a war crime committed by German paratroopers against a Swiss archaeologist.There is a lot going on in this book and it deserves a close reading. It is, of course, a mystery, and a good one that will keep the reader's attention to the very last page. It is also a fine bit of anthropology, exploring the Cretan landscape and the customs of its not-always-too-civilized inhabitants. "The Road to Ithaca" also continues the exploration of the soul of Martin von Bora, a decent man in the service of a monstrous regime. Fortunately, he is not a cardboard saint like so many of the Good Germans in similar novels; Ben Pastor gives us real human being, quite believable as a Wehrmacht officer. He is a veteran of he Spanish Civil War, having fought on the side of Franco, and of the Polish campaign of 1939. He is eager to begin the invasion of Russia which he knows to be imminent; he wants to make Germany great again -- but not at the cost of his integrity as an officer of the old Prussian army caste.To make things more delightful, Pastor treats von Bora as a latter-day Ulysses and weaves in the Greek mythology, Minoan history, and Homeric epics that are part of the Cretan landscape. Those who know their classics will be tickled by the appearance of references to Sirens, the Cyclops, and quest of Ulysses for a safe landing.

I'm a fan of Ben Pastor and I eagerly await his books. There are not a lot of authors who write from the nazi side of history and giving his protagonist a kind of anti-nazi perspective offers insights not easily found elsewhere. The Martin Bora books are well written, have good pace and usually interesting and well researched story lines. In the Road to Ithaca a little known corner of an ugly and murderous war is revealed...You can taste the dust and feel the heat. I read it in the tail end of Canadian winter. Just what I needed.

Quite a good read if you are following Bora’s career.Still think that “Tin Sky” is the best by far the best of the series

Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora novels are all wonderfully profound but if I had to pick a favourite it’s The Road to Ithaca, in which Bora is a latter-day Ulysses in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Crete, investigating war crimes

Attempts to blend with Greek mythology simply blurred what otherwise might have been a compelling yarn