Review: The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Lax

In the late 1930s, before the fighting has started, Ernst Vogler is working for Hitler's art-collecting department in Berlin. When his supervisor mysteriously disappears, he is given a special assignment: Go to Rome, pick up the ancient marble statue The Discus Thrower, and transport it across the border to German-held lands. It was to be a quick trip, and the arrangements were made for him. But even as Ernst receives the crated statue and meets his escort of two Italian policemen, who happened to be identical twins, he senses that things are already heading off course.

Once the trio is on the road, the brothers begin to disagree on which route to take and when and where they should stop. All Ernst wants is to get the statue home by the quickest way possible. When the twins' argument take a serious turn, Ernst finds himself enmeshed in much more than family trouble and is soon worried about his personal safety and future.

The Detour, by Andromeda Romano-Lax, is told as a frame story. The beginning and end are in the present tense, which in this context is about 1948, leaving the bulk of the novel to be told as a memory. From the first pages, we have hint of where the story might lead, but Romano-Lax's characters have their own ideas how they'll take us to that end.

Although The Detour is clearly a story of the early days of Nazi Germany, it covers new ground. Ernst's rise in the party is mostly accidental, and he is generally smart enough to accept and be grateful for his good luck. On the other hand, serendipity has made him somewhat unobservant, and he doesn't realize until it's too late that the brothers have essentially taken over his mission.

Romano-Lax's descriptive prose of the northern Italian countryside and its people is vivid when Ernst's memories are sharp and clear and becomes appropriately vaguer when Ernst himself is unsure of past events. This device works well and tightens our connection to the young art collector. In the end, Ernst's story is a well-constructed tale of awakening--to self-acceptance, love, death, and the dark side of the Third Reich.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook edition (AudioGo, 8 hr, 17 min) read by Dan Butler. My complete (and positive) audio review was written for AudioFile magazine.

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Published by Soho Press, 2012
ISBN-13: 9781616950491
Source: Review (see review policy)
Rating: B
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