Review: Dark seekers
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 6, 2012
Outside American noir, which Jeter dragged clicking and screaming into the twenty-first century in his novel of that name, the cinema's darkest shadows are arguably those of the Weimar Republic, angled with Expressionism and darkened yet further in retrospect by the horrors that followed. In The Kingdom of Shadows, the monochrome film of pre-war Hollywood and wartime UFA serves as an extended metaphor of light, darkness and the powers and perils of the imagination. The protagonists, Pavli Iosefni and his cousin Marte, are Lazarenes, members of an obscure ethnic-religious group who carry tattoos of Christ's stigmata and lay claim to some remarkable, though sparingly depicted, supernatural abilities. Marte's story could almost be a black parody of the Marilyn Monroe-JFK affair; born without the incriminating marks of her race thanks to her father's betrayal of his heritage, she grows into a mysterious beauty onto whom men can project their dreams and desires - men including Pavli, and including also the Reich's director of public enlightenment and notorious womaniser, Joseph Goebbels. The portrayal of historical monsters is a delicate business, but Jeter's depiction of Goebbels is something of an understated triumph. As Marte rises to queenly status in the Nazi film industry, Pavli is rounded up with other Lazarene men; they are kept out of the death camps, but only because the Nazis want something more from them than slave labour. Jeter's prose in this book is much less intense than in the science-fiction and horror novels of his prolific phase in the eighties and early nineties; but given the non-fictional horrors of the period and the strange delicacy of the characters, perhaps a quieter style is more appropriate. The Kingdom of Shadows is a worthy, and very welcome, addition to Jeter's canon.