Finally, this is what I was looking for from Vonnegut. There's nobody from Mercury, nobody being replaced by a computer, no futuristic settings, no harmoniums, no peat carved into sirens. Instead we get people...humans...flawed and imperfect.
As always, spoilers abound...
You have been warned...
Vonnegut opens the book with an introduction in which he writes "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I just happen to know what it is...'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be' " and amends that "When you're dead, you're dead." and even offers that "yet another moral occurs to [him] now; Make love when you can. It's good for you."
The simplistic, direct route makes for a pretty spectacular Vonnegut introduction, tying himself into the background of the book, having been a World War II soldier, himself. The rest of the book is framed as being a memoir of Howard W Campbell, Jr., a Nazi propagandist and broadcaster who was secretly an American agent providing coded messages in his daily radio broadcasts during World War II.
Very few people, however, know that Campbell was an American spy - himself, his army contact, and FDR, himself. Everyone else in the world believes Campbell to be a former Nazi now living in New York City as an old, broken man with one friend, a chess player who lives in an apartment downstairs.
Once Campbell's open secret gets out, however, his life turns to crap pretty quickly as he is 'saved' by a white supremacist (with a black chauffeur), reunited with his 'wife' (lost and assumed dead for thirty years), captured by American agents, attacked by the American soldier who captured him in World War II, forced from his home by looters, and finally taken to Israel to stand trial as he hands himself over to a Jewish dentist in his apartment building.
It's not exactly a laugh riot, admittedly, but it is the best thing I've read in Vonnegut's first three novels in spite of the fact that Vonnegut himself gave The Sirens of Titan an A grade.
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We continue to struggle to find a fully-realized female character as Calen had wondered from book one. The only two female characters are Campbell's wife Helga, who isn't in the novel much and whose position on a pedestal is to high and unassailable that the second female character, Resi, Helga's sister, is able to impersonate Helga with little more than a dye job and a story. So much of Campbell's life image is wrapped up in his wife that her disappearance - with no conclusive end - just ruins him to the modern day, but that doesn't mean that Helga is anything resembling a three-dimensional character. She is written in reflection as the madonna and the whore (Campbell's The Monogamous Casanova is about as clear a paean to wanting a woman to be both of those identities as is possible), as the perfect actress, as the most beautiful woman ever...but she isn't a person in any real way.
Resi, then, loves Campbell as a thirteen- (or so) year old, but it is played as puppy love, something that Campbell brushes off with little thought but who then comes back to be Campbell's Helga just when he needs her the most. Resi, however, doesn't love Campbell in any rich, well thought-out way but rather looks to trap Campbell in the memory of a false love and then reveal herself after one night of connubial bliss. There isn't a relationship there. There isn't love. There's deception that - once achieved - is immediately abandoned.
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Campbell at one point is asked by the Blue Fairy, his American spy handler, where he would have been had the Nazis won, had Campbell never been able to tell anyone that he was really an American agent. Campbell says he would certainly have lead a successful life high up in the Nazi hierarchy, continuing as a propagandist but not ever writing a novel or play again in his life. He might not have believed the Nazi beliefs, but he had played the part long enough and well enough that he would continue to play it through simple momentum for a few more decades.
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In Mother Night we again get Vonnegut musing on friendship and particularly on the traitorous end of friendship. In Sirens of Titan, Unk/Malachi killed his best friend on Mars, Stony Stevenson, because the Martians controlled his brain and wiped his memories of Stony. The traitorous act haunted Unk/Malachi until the end of his life, only being resolved in a fever dream on the moment of his death.
Here Campbell recounts the tale of two significant betrayals of friendship. The first is Campbell's betrayal, taking his friend's motorcycle, the one significant possession his friend had in the falling moments of Nazi Germany. Campbell's friend even tells him that the motorcycle is the only thing that ever mattered to him, that he wouldn't give up smoking to save his wife but that he gave up smoking to save his motorcycle. Campbell, then, 'borrowed' the motorcycle knowing that he would never return it.
In his later days Campbell was the victim of such a betrayal as his downstairs neighbor and only friend in New York City Kraft/Potapov turns out to be a Russian spy who decides to turn him over the to Russian authorities but finds himself captured instead by the American agents lead by the Blue Fairy Godmother.
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Onward we roll along to Vonnegut's return to science fiction with Cat's Cradle.
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