Review: Mother Night

I found Mother Night to be an utterly fascinating read, perhaps even more interesting than Slaughterhouse Five. It begins with a plain statement of the book's moral, the eerie and appropriate "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". I love that the moral prefaces the entire telling of the story, because it kept me on edge throughout the entire book, looking for the danger in every lie and hidden truth.

The story that follows, though it jumps around throughout the narrator's personal history, reads coherently and provides the reader with a robust picture of Howard W. Campbell. Campbell is a frank and honest man facing what he believes will be his execution and this makes him a very reliable narrator. He has the voice of a man completely disinterested with even the smallest lie for the sake of vanity. It is this brutal honesty in the face of his own mortality that endears him to me - not any heroic actions he undertook as a double agent during the war.

The book is typical Vonnegut in that his hero is constantly cut down, ridiculed and marginalized. He is reminded that no matter how much he might have assisted the Allied war effort, he gave considerable justification to the Nazi cause as well - he repeatedly meets Nazis who praise him and attribute their devotion to the cause to his eloquent radio broadcasts. He is a lucid and sane man who sees his actions for what they were - simultaneously constructive and destructive. He is fully aware of the evil done by his words, and takes full responsibility for his actions during the war even though they were done in his patriotic duty as a double agent. Meanwhile he is surrounded by unrepentant Nazis hoping to cop an insanity plea for their own actions. The only man with a half decent excuse for his actions is the only one not looking for one.

The end of this one is really powerful - for me the most touching moment is when Campbell insists on turning himself in, and the old woman recognizes in him the same utter inability to move forward or function without direct command that she saw in the faces of the people interred in the concentration camps. Campbell is so captivated and haunted by that same history and his part in it that he is wasting away himself, unable to place one foot in front of the other and walk out into the night as a free man. And of course, the final verdict managed to catch me off guard - it shocked and thrilled me. It has always seemed to me that the people who suffer the most are those who deserve it the least, and this book really illustrates that principle. Campbell is a sensitive man who suffers doubly, in recalling his actions and admitting his responsibility for them. He believes himself deserving of punishment and lives haunted by his crimes while the world spins around him, full of men denying their crimes and lying to live.