Potsdam Station

February 7, 2011
Set in early 1945, Downing's gripping fourth novel featuring Anglo-American journalist John Russell (after Stettin Station) finds Russell in the Soviet Union. As the Russians approach Berlin, Russell devotes his energies to trying to reunite with his loved ones—his 18-year-old son, Paul, a member of the German army on the Eastern Front, and his lover, Effi Koenen, a former actress who now works to smuggle Jews to safety. Russell attempts to persuade the Russians that he should accompany them into Berlin, but they suspect that he's an American spy sent to sell them on the idea that the U.S. and Britain have no interest in the German capital. Meanwhile, the Nazis pick up a group of refugees Effi helped to escape, raising the prospect that one of them might disclose her involvement. Downing convincingly portrays the final days of the Nazis in power, and his characters are rich enough to warrant a continuation of their stories, even after the war.

March 1, 2011

The fourth in Downing's World War II "station" series (Stettin Station, 2010, etc.) finds journalist-spy John Russell making a Faustian pact with the Russians poised to invade Berlin, where his girlfriend Effi and son Paul struggle to survive the Reich's final days.

From roving SS squads intent on preventing desertion to bombardment and imminent invasion by Russian soldiers bent on rape and revenge, Berlin is fraught with danger for average citizens—far worse for underground operatives like Effi who help smuggle Jews to safety or for German soldiers like Paul, at the front under heavy fire. All Russell knows is his family is trapped in Berlin and that Eisenhower has promised Berlin to the Russians, so if he's going to get there, it's going to be in a Russian tank. He flies to Berlin where his requests to be attached as a journalist to the Red Army unit are rebuffed, but he manages to get the authorities' attention all the same. Eventually, the Russians agree to place him on a team searching Berlin for German atomic secrets. He's parachuted into the surrounding environs with no idea how he'll find his girlfriend and son, even less how he'll avoid liquidation at the hands of the Russians once their mission ends and he represents a liability. He can't know that Effi, harboring a Jewish orphan, has run afoul of the authorities, or even whether she and Paul are alive. Downing's characters are a bit thin and given to disingenuous reflection on the history they're witnessing. Certain turns of events are a little convenient, and his true mission, to save his loved ones, without clear direction and floundering in the chaos, lacks tension. The main attraction is the tragic mis-en-scène of a once-beautiful city undergoing the ravages of modern warfare, a wide-angle synthesis of scenes and snapshots from the history books.

A wide canvas painted with broad strokes. What suspense there is lies in the protagonist's endgame, with atomic secrets up his sleeve and his loved ones' lives in peril.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011
When we last saw American journalist John Russell, he was in Berlin in 1938 (Silesian Station, 2008), spying simultaneously for Germans, Americans, and Russians but mainly trying to stay alive and protect his German son, Paul, and film-actress girlfriend, Effi. Its seven years later now, April 1945, and the Reich is in its death throes. Having been forced years earlier to leave Germany to escape the Nazis, Russell is in Russia and, eager to reunite with his loved ones, trying to talk his way back into Berlin with the Soviet forces. Meanwhile, Effi is helping Jewish fugitives living in Berlin escape the city, while Paul, in the army, struggles to survive the Soviet onslaught (There were too many ways to be killed and too many hours in the day). The fate of Russell and his family drives the narrative, but our attention is held more by a succession of surreal images that tells the nightmarish story of a wars endwomen, taking advantage of a brief break in the bombing, frantically carving up a dead horse for food; Paul carrying two large sacks of arms, legs, and heads from an exploded building. Excruciating but gripping reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)