I’ve written three posts already in Talk about books about the novels of Scott Turow. It was while writing the second of these that I first noticed something that I take to be an important feature of his fiction: in each book he makes a particular effort to do something quite different from anything he’s done previously. Of course it was already obvious to me that the expectations excited by one book are almost never met in the next. The reader of Presumed Innocent (1987) must have been surprised (maybe even disappointed) by The Burden of Proof (1990), and neither of those books can have led anybody to expect Pleading Guilty (1993). The next two books are equally stark departures from what has gone before. And so on, at roughly three-year intervals over a career that has so far lasted 37 years. But while the lack of resemblance between each novel and its predecessor would have been hard to miss, it was only when I reread several of them one after the other so as to write about them that I noticed that Turow had been deliberately following a pattern.
There were several books that I wasn’t able to reread for that post. The ones I skipped included Pleading Guilty and its immediate successor, The Laws of Our Fathers (1996) (about which I wrote subsequently) and the two books I think of as particular outliers, the subjects of today’s post. They’re the ones whose main action takes place far from Kindle County, the ones that feature American lawyers in war-torn Europe. Unlike Ordinary Heroes (2005) which is set in the winter of 1944–5, as the armies of Patton and Montgomery push across the continent, Testimony (2017) is about the investigation of a possible war-crime which is alleged to have been committed about 10 years after the Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia.
I see that in that second post, I wrote that the “main narrator” of Ordinary Heroes is the journalist Stew Dubinsky. This is a bit misleading. Stew Dubinsky’s is the framing narrative, in which he tells us that he was astonished, going through his father’s papers after his death, to discover that at the end of the Second World War, his father had been tried and convicted by court martial. David Dubin admitted to having released Lieutenant Robert Martin, whom he’d been ordered to arrest for insubordination and who showed every sign of being a Soviet spy. Dubin was sentenced to five years’ hard labour but it was apparent that he hadn’t served the sentence.
Instead, he married a woman he had reportedly fallen in love with when she was liberated from a concentration camp where she had been a prisoner. That woman became the mother of Stew Dubinsky and his sister, and lived with David Dubin till his death. Clearly some important details were missing from this account.
Having lied to the nonagenarian retired justice who had represented David Dubin at his court martial in 1945, Stew obtained his father’s typewritten account of his activities in wartime France. The account had not been used at the trial: both Dubin and his lawyer, Barrington Leach, agreed that it would damage rather than help his case. Leach told Stew that his father had himself been a very able trial lawyer.
As a member of the Judge Advocate General’s staff, Dubin had been working ten hours a day, seven days a week, acting alternately as prosecution and defence lawyer, in cases of US servicement charged with “murder, rape, assault, major thefts and insubordination” (p. 20). The work was demanding, monotonous and not very edifying. Eventually, Dubin’s colonel offered him a change of scene: he was to investigate the complaint of insubordination by General Roland Teedle agains Major Robert Martin. Teedle maintained that Martin had been ignoring his orders and carrying on a campaign of his own with no regard to military discipline.
“Well, if you ever find yourself in the middle of a battlefield, Lieutenant, what you’ll see around you is a bunch of fellows scared shitless, as they should be, and one or two sons of bitches jumping up and down and acting as if the bullets can’t touch them. They get hit sooner or later, believe me, but it takes a hell of a lot longer than you’d think. Martin’s one of those. Thinks he’s invincible. I don’t like that either. A soldier who’s not afraid to die is a danger to everybody. (p. 33)
Martin denied that he was under Teedle’s command. He received his orders direct from the OSS. Those orders were not in writing because if he were caught by the Germans in possession of such orders, he’d be shot as a spy. Martin’s particular talent was for blowing up railway lines and similar acts of sabotage. He took Dubin along on an operation to destroy an enormous arms dump under La Saline Royale. The operation appeared to be a spectacular success but Dubin later learned that General Patton was furious. The explosion caused a German Panzer division to hold back and so avoid an ambush that the Third Army had set for them.
Patton’s anger echoes that of General Teedle who had earlier complained to Dubin that Martin’s insistence on working independently:
“But twice I’ve sent troops to the wrong position because I didn’t know he’d already blown the lines. I’ve had to hold off artillery because I got late word that Martin and his men turned up in the target area, without any prior communication to me …” (p. 33)
Dubin was ordered to arrest Martin, and began a pursuit across northern France, Belgium and Luxembourg before catching up with his target in a concentration camp at Balingen in Germany. As the Battle of the Bulge raged around them, Dubin was more than once diverted into combat. At one point he and the MP sergeant who was acting as his driver parachuted into a beseiged town with a consignment of medical supplies. The plane that dropped them was shot down soon afterwards.
The Lieutanant Colonel in charge of the town’s defence was bemused that the army had paid a high price to send him a lawyer rather than a doctor, and flabbergasted that the lawyer was there to “arrest one of my best combat officers” (p. 173).
“… The Germans have us surrounded. We have damned little food, less ammunition, and the only medical supplies I’ve seen are the ones that fell with you. So I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with yourself, but I promise you this — you’re not arresting Bob Martin …” (p. 174)
Dubin was a 1st Lieutenant with infantry training but no combat experience. He was put in charge of a rifle company stationed to the west of the town — the side from which the Germans were less likely to approach. They found a network of foxholes that had been dug by the formerly retreating Germans. They shovelled the snow out of them and dug in. Their position was not noticeably different from that of infantry in the First World War. They suffered from trench foot, insanitary conditions and, above all, unremitting cold. Ultimately, Dubin and those of his men to survived had to play dead, lying in the snow for nine hours while two German snipers in the trees watched them for signs of movement.
He chose to spend his R&R leave in London where he approached the OSS and confirmed that the prevailing view there was that Bob Martin was working for the Soviets, though the officer he spoke to was optimistic that there was a less discreditable explanation for his behaviour.
In his various escapades Martin was accompanied by Gita Lodz, a Polish woman who usefully combined talents for nursing and sabotage. Martin had met her when she was attempting to steal drugs from a hospital in Marseille. Dubin became fascinated by Gita Lodz to the point almost of obsession. She assured Dubin that she was no longer sexually or romantically involved with Martin, but continued to act as if her primary loyalty was to him. Understandably so, since Martin was facing almost inevitable conviction, to be followed by death by hanging — until Dubin let him go.
I don’t read a lot of war fiction and I’m not really equipped to say whether this book is a good example. It seems to me that the revelation of what Martin was actually up to lifts this novel above the level it would otherwise have achieved.
Having been through combat, Dubin found that his feelings about the justice and rightness of the war had changed:
I had been on the Continent now for six months, half a year, not much longer than a semester in school, but it was impossible to recall the person I had been before. I had fought in terror, and I had learned to despise war. There was no glory in the savagery I saw. No reason. And surely no law. It was only brutality, scientifically perfected on both sides, in which great ingenuity had been deployed in the creation of giant killing machines. There was nothing to be loyal to in any of this and surely no cause for pride. (p. 327)
But having seen the conditions in the concentration camp, and knowing what had been done there, he modified his view again.
Because knowing everything now, I saw this terrible war had to happen, with all its gore and witless destruction, and might well happen again. If human beings could do this, it seemed unfathomable how we could ever save ourselves. In Balingen, it was incontestable that cruelty was the law of the universe. (p. 327)
Testimony (2017) is not set during wartime but about 20 years after the Bosnian war ended. It opens with the testimony of Ferko Rincic, who says that he is the only witness to the burial alive of 400 Roma in a mine near a US Army base in Bosnia in 2005, an alleged war crime of which he and his young son were the only survivors. The case is investigated by Bill ten Boom, former US Attorney and subsequently defence lawyer specializing in white-collar crime. When the book opens, he’s working as a prosecutor before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. I posted a book review on Google Plus (and probably also on Goodreads) just a few months after the book was published.
Rereading both the book and my review, I now think I was unfair in my criticism of the way in which the story is wound up. Other reviews online have been critical of different aspects of the novel, particularly Turow’s lack of familiarity with the ICC’s jurisdiction and procedure. The most trenchant example I’ve found is a comment by Kevin Jon Heller, a Professor of International Law and Security. He lists 13 errors, some more serious than others.
I’m tempted to take issue with three of these in particular: the initial “doozy” about the Pre-Trial Chamber hearing into whether an investigation should be authorized, and also items 10 and 12, both of which have to do with the American Service-Members Protection Act 2002. But rather than get into a dispute with a Professor of International Law about an area in which I have no expertise whatever, I’d like to concentrate on points at which the professor’s reading of the novel might be questionable.
I’m sure he’s right to say that, because Bosnia had referred the case, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was free to investigate without authorization from the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC). But I’m wondering if it was open to the OTP to apply to the PTC even though there was no requirement to do so. Ferko is the only witness and there are doubts about his reliability. When it turns out that Ferko was lying outright, Boom reflects:
The plain fact was that we had consumed a lot of the court’s resources on allegations that were unfounded. At this stage it was a blessing that Ferko’s testimony had been presented in public and that three judges had voted to authorise the investigation. (p. 400)
Heller’s point 10 reads:
There is no legal reason why the ICC could not use documents the US produced in (ostensible) violation of the American Service-Members Protection Act (ASPA).
The characters expressly acknowledge that the ASPA has no application outside the United States and is not binding on the ICC. But they leave open the possibility that the Court might refuse to admit evidence that had been obtained in breach of an American service-member’s (ostensible) rights or expectations under that statute. That possibility might be more theoretical than real, but the American side seem to have taken it seriously. That’s why Roger and Merry insisted that Boom’s second meeting with Merry, where Merry handed over the evidence, had to take place on US soil, and not in the Bosnian embassy as the first meeting had.
According to point 12: “Nothing in the ASPA makes it illegal for a member of the Court to investigate in the US.” In spite of what he says, Boom is quite aware of this. The final part of the novel, Part VIII, has the title “Breaking the Law”, and in it Boom is back in the United States, where he meets and gets information from Esma/Emira, General Merriwell and Attila. He doesn’t imagine that he’s risking any kind of punitive consequences: his purpose in repeatedly referring to his supposedly illegal status is to point up what he sees as the absurdity of the ASPA. If he didn’t already know that the Act couldn’t prevent him from investigating in the US, Roger had already told him:
“There’s no criminal provision in that law, hotshot. As you already know, Merriwell is in favor of opening the books on all of this. But if any American were to be prosecuted in the future on the basis of these documents, he or she could claim that the records were produced in violation of the act and therefore are not competent evidence in any court.” (p. 211)
There is of course no guarantee that the ICC would accept that argument but it would at least give the person on trial a leg to stand on. So, maybe Turow’s novel isn’t quite as misleading as to the work of the ICC as Heller thinks.
Ordinary Heroes begins:
All parents keep secrets from their children. My father, it seemed, kept more than most. (p. 5)
By the end of the novel, Stew Dubinsky had discovered the remarkable secrets that his father had kept. But it was his mother’s secret that really shook his sense of self. His mother was not Jewish, and since descent in Judaism is matrilineal, neither he nor his sister was fully Jewish, though they had a Jewish father. With difficulty, Stew accepted that his parents didn’t have any real choice in the circumstances but to maintain the pretence.
As Mrs. David Dubin, she had raised me and loved me. She’d been to hundreds of Holocaust remembrances and synagogue services, had worked tirelessly at the Haven to aid Jews in need, most of them survivors or Russian immigrants. Her identity was assumed as a matter of necessity, but she was loyal to it, just as she had been to my father. (p. 366)
Bill ten Boom’s situation in Testimony is almost the converse. Until he was 40, he had believed that his parents were Dutch. When he reached that age, they told him that they were Jewish, and had assumed (with the approval of the ten Boom family) the identities of a young couple who had been killed in a carcrash. Unlike Stew Dubinsky, Boom didn’t feel that his sense of identity had been undermined, but he was angry with his parents for not having told him and his sister when they were much younger.
There’s a curious kind of counterpart to that reverse parallel between the two novels. Compare these two passages:
Yet my parents had taken to heart the lesson of Orpheus and could return to the world of light only by never looking back. (Ordinary Heroes, p. 363)
It was also the final unapologetic renunciation of their families, a way to tell themselves that they had learned the lesson of Lot’s wife and would never look back. (Testimony, p. 378)
Editions: Ordinary Heroes, Pan Books paperback, 2006; Testimony Pan Books paperback, 2018.