0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Loved the mystery, the intrigue and the realistic war material, 27 April 2011
By Samuel Rafael - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Behind the Enemy (Kindle Edition)
This is a novel about war and gender transformation. Overall, I found it to be quite an enjoyable experience that even had me riveted at times, yet, like the character flaws of Louis/Louisa, the major protagonist, and I certainly don't mean her gender issues, this book was not without its share of problems.
As I digested the story through the filter of all my WW II mental imagery, although I did sympathize somewhat with the portrayal of a few of the German characters, it was just a little bit difficult for me to really like them as the author portrays them, even the "likable ones." I'm old enough to have lived, as a child, through that war. My memory of the era, however, comes much more clearly into focus in the aftermath, when the US was airlifting food to the starving European population, a time when I first realized, now as a slightly older and more aware child, what a cataclysm this war had been. The dawning of this conclusion coincides with the first time I saw pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, the cremation ovens and the bodies stacked up like so much cordwood. These horrible graphic images are still deeply etched in my mind.
Years later I learned, in an undergraduate psychology course I took, taught by one of the psychiatrists who examined many captured German leaders just prior to the Nuremberg trials, the German army all the way to their upper echelon, felt they were "just following orders." That, I'm sure, was also the mentality of the rest of the population who either denied and/or permitted these atrocities to take place.
With all of that going on for me, the main area of difficulty I had with this book was the gender transformation of the central character, Louis/Louisa. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be problematic for me at all, because it's one of the major reasons I bought the book in the first place. But, here is a person who lived for almost 20 years as a boy and a young man, albeit a rather effeminate one, apparently having an unrealized intersex or transgender condition. Well, that "denial" (naiveté?) was a bit of a stretch for me, but I guess it could be possible. But suddenly, and without any warning, Louis, who is by now in combat as an enlistee in the British Armed Forces, morphs, over a period of just ONE WEEK, into a beautiful, totally believable, and fully functioning young woman!
In so doing, Louis, now Louisa leaves all her former maleness behind. Perhaps post traumatic stress disorder brought about by war, can result in more complications than I ever knew to be possible. On top of this, the transformation appears to coincide from the moment an old gypsy woman slipped a mysterious ring on the finger of Louis, a band that somehow, and for some never-defined reason, cannot seem to be removed.
On the other hand (no pun intended), I did find the author's portrayal of the rapid change of Louis to Louisa to be quite titillating, almost like watching a time-lapse video of a flower rapidly unfolding, but my excitement was rather short lived. For once Louis transforms into Louisa, she becomes a true woman in every sense of the word. There seems to be no residual maleness left in her whatsoever and all those years of male enculturation appear to have completely vanished. Louisa now functions and thinks as a complete woman. She seems to have no gender baggage whatsoever, other than her fear of sharing about her gender change with her family and her lover.
On the positive side, Louisa was realistically portrayed as a woman. She became a heroine in every sense of the word, and, like any real person, she was not without her flaws. The major one appearing to be a self-esteem issue only related to one aspect of her transformation, in that, with all her other obvious courage, she was not brave enough to be forthright about her male past with her lover, whom she later marries, still without first informing him of the truth. Bummer, but that's not the real problem. The main issue I had is that one really has to suspend disbelief about how Louisa's gender transformation came about. I would have liked to hear more about her struggle to adjust to being a woman and the turmoil it must have been to go from a male gender role to a female one, and so quickly, too. But no, that didn't happen in this book. Louisa adjusted to her fate, all too rapidly and unrealistically for my tastes.
In the final analysis, while this novel attempts to give some humanity to the German people, as they were caught up in the Hitler war machine, unable to extract themselves from this charismatic and diabolical leader, I still cannot excuse them for the carnage they inflicted, for their narcissistic and devastating search for more "living space", for their warped attempt to create "racial purity", for the Holocaust and for "just following orders." Yes, I can see how fear and economic hardship translated into xenophobic nationalism that swept Germany away because I think an element of that is just beginning to emerge here in the United States, but, not to diverge too much, I still cannot really forgive the German people for what they did or didn't do with regard to the Hitler era. And I am saddened to think that over the coming years and decades, these horrible images of that war will fade from the general memory, and the world, if there still is one as we know it, will forget the lessons of history and be doomed to repeat them. Without being too heavy about it, I think, in that sense, this otherwise fine novel does a disservice to those times.
All of these criticisms aside, the novel really was quite a good one. I loved the mystery, the spying intrigue and the realistic war material that was presented. The novel was a good review of history, as well, and it was very exciting and well-written. As I said, I liked Louisa as a woman, but she was not too believable as an intersex or transgender character.
