The war that never ended
Joseph Kanon's 'Alibi' lurks in Venice's shadows
By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- For most, Venice conjures images of romance and timeless -- almost lazy -- elegance.
Then World War II came along and spoiled the party.
Spared from Axis and Allied bombs, Venice survived the war largely untouched, and the expatriate scene began to revive as early as 1946, while the rest of Europe starved and froze in the genesis of the Cold War.
It is this immediate postwar era that has long fascinated Joseph Kanon, who trolls the war's aftermath to explore what he considers the watershed moments of modern Western culture -- the Holocaust ("The Good German," 2002) and the Bomb ("Los Alamos," 1998).
His new book, "Alibi" (Henry Holt), delves into the relationship between the postwar era, when everybody wants to move on and forget, with the atrocities that nobody can.
"One of the things that's always interested me, from the first book on, is unintended consequences," Kanon said. "When I was writing about the scientists in Los Alamos, what fascinated me about them was that these were people who, for supposedly all the right reasons -- patriotism, crossing a frontier in science and so on -- nevertheless create this extraordinary problem for everyone. They bring us face to face with the prospect of annihilation.
"This must be I guess the most extreme form of unintended consequence, but it seemed to me a great metaphor for things that happen all the time."
Missing 'that almost Gene Kelly brightness'
The 58-year-old Kanon, formerly a publishing executive, was quick to connect his chosen period with the current one.
"I think that this period, that is to say the end of the war, is a very interesting one for Americans, one that we look back on now with great nostalgia," he said.
"We were not as involved with moral complexities as the Europeans might have been, but we hadn't gone through what a lot of people had gone through. Fifty years later, it's very different; we're now living in a very complicated world, and we no longer have that almost Gene Kelly brightness, where we're just going to come in and fix things."
Unlike "The Good German," which was set in a bombed-out postwar Berlin, "Alibi" unfolds in an awakening Venice, where vibrant cafe society evokes prewar frivolity.
"Having written about a place that was utterly destroyed, it struck me as interesting to look at a place that had come through the war almost literally unscathed," Kanon explained. "I thought, 'And yet and yet and yet ... Does any place [really] come out unscathed?' "
Kanon says Venice didn't escape the fascism that engulfed the rest of Italy at the time; the city merely ignored it. "Venice was always one step removed from what was going on. If you were in Turin or in Milan or one of the industrial centers, you would have had a much more active political constituency. Venice essentially lived for itself."
"Alibi" concerns Adam Miller, a U.S. war crimes investigator who visits his mother in the city. He becomes involved with a Jewish woman, and when a murder is committed, he's drawn into the darker aspects of this postwar haven.
The Nazis and the Americans
Kanon had a great deal of research material to draw upon.
"There are so many diaries and letters," he said. "The expat community that exists in the book is roughly the one I've traced through the memoirs, diaries and literature of the late '40s and early '50s. The postwar [expatriate] scene did start up very quickly; the minute the war was over, people went back as soon as they could."
As with Kanon's earlier novels, a theme prevalent in "Alibi" is the rather shady contact area between high-ranking Nazi survivors and U.S. intelligence. This is a crucial but surprisingly thinly researched area; it continues to be a rich vein to mine for authors of historical fiction and nonfiction alike.
"Perhaps history and distance and time enable us to face things that nobody particularly wanted to look at at the time, but it's very important that all of this be known. How did this happen?" Kanon asked.
"This is the great crisis in Western culture; there's nothing comparable to it. How it could have happened, the level of responsibility that people take for it, I think, is still the great issue."
