Stefen’s Bookclub – February

Swastika Night by Murray Constantine

Because a January book club would fall too close to New Years Eve and so many people go away around that time, we’ll following our usual plan and skipping January and having our first book club for 2017 on the first Tuesday of February.

The book for the February meet will be Swastika Night, which sharp readers will recognise as the feature review title from last month. Because of that, I’ll keep my notes here brief. In short, this is a book about a totalitarian future after seven hundred years of Nazi control of Europe and Britain. This is the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ of Nazi rhetoric as imagined by anti fascist and feminist Katharine Burdekin, writing under the name Murray Constantine. A few things of note are that she wrote the book two years before the Nazi invasion of Poland and that it pre-dates the book it is often compared to, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by twelve years. I’m looking forward to this one, there’s a lot to unpack and all sorts of other comparisons to books and situations. It’s only a short book, coming in just shy of two hundred pages but nevertheless I think we’re going to have a lot to talk about.