Ranulph Fiennes: The Secret Hunters

By MARK BROATCH

Moulding a fictional body around the factual frame of the Jewish experience in war-time Europe is a tricky reconstruction task, as Helen Demidenko found to her cost. The English-Australian author, nee Darville, had claimed falsely a Ukrainian background as her novel went some way towards defending Ukraine natives' role in the Holocaust.

In The Secret Hunters, Ranulph Fiennes, knight of the realm, Pole explorer extraordinaire, sometime novelist and cousin to the actor brothers, takes a more orthodox route.

In this, the soft-cover version to a hardback out last year, Fiennes relates the tale of how he found the logbook of a 55-year-old Canadian, Derek Jacobs, who was stranded at an Antarctic hut in 1994.

Jacobs had written of belonging to the Nazi-hunting group of the title, installing himself as cook on a boat to the icy continent with the brutal monster who terrorised his mother during the war to extract a long-awaited revenge.

In the 400-odd pages it takes to recreate a possible story of Jacobs and his Jewish-German family and get back to this point, Fiennes relates a tale of death, degradation and disgust, but also of love and hope, fleshing out putative fact with plenty of research and a fair turn of phrase.

But there's probably too much crammed in here. As well as the casual nastiness of the German persecution of Jews as the war took hold, Fiennes gives a gruesome peek inside the concentration camps and the death marches, and even takes a side trip to the butchery in Rwanda. The book implicates afresh IBM, Bayer and the makers of Zyklon-B for helping the cause.

At times Fiennes just forgets the plot and makes an extended case for the prosecution, rolling out the numbers, slamming the deniers and even contemplating why many ordinary Germans had been, at best, turn-the-other-way bystanders.

Fiennes' ability to describe accurately treks over ice and snow is probably unparalleled, but the fact/fiction switchover is disconcerting at times, and some of the dialogue is a touch clunky:

"Once I danced with dashing blond Catholic boy, and as I was also blonde then, I felt very much a Gentile."

"So, you never experienced ethnic hostility?"

"Not until I was 16. Never."

The author sticks pages of explanatory and historical dialogue into the mouths of Derek's Aunt Ruth and the few Jewish refugees who escaped alongside.

Fiennes intends this to be a serious exercise. It has maps of the Jewish death marches, a prologue, an epilogue and a detailed index, but it is probably better suited to filling the dreary hours between servings of plastic food and in-flight movies than any course curriculum.

Surprisingly, it never feels so unbearably awful that you have to put it down but it makes for a bit of an iceberg: slightly unapproachable and bottom-heavy.

The Secret Hunters does gather pace as Derek's long pursuit comes to an end, and you may even start to care about the chief characters rather than the many sad victims along the way.

Those with patience - and perhaps a long flight - unacquainted with the unbelievable horrors of the pogroms, the ghettos or the marches will uncover for themselves a modern horror story.

Penguin

$22.95

* Mark Broatch is an Auckland reviewer.