Book Review: The Torqued Man by Peter Mann
By Doreen Sheridan
January 21, 2022
A twinned manuscript is found in the rubble of a bombed out Berlin at the end of World War II. One half of the manuscript is the journal of former Abwehr agent Adrian de Groot, recounting the daily life of a German citizen forced to work for the Nazi regime. The other is a fantastical chronicle of the exploits of the legendary Finn McCool, reborn in the form of former IRA fighter Proinnsias “Frank” Pike, who escaped the Spanish prison where he’d been held by Franco’s troops and apparently disappeared into Germany:
[Pike] consulted his repertoire of tales and, feeling fatigue for all stories concerning his youth in Ireland, his criminal misadventures in New York, and his sobering political education in Spain, he decided to regale himself with the story of his ascension from the pit, chronicling his metamorphosis into the mighty hunter Finn. He would tell the tale of Finn McCool, secret death-dealing ambidexter, scourge of Nazi doctors, and redeemer of Europe–currently stuck in the bowels of Berlin.
While Pike is busy romanticizing his underground rebellious exploits, de Groot is writing his own straightforward if occasionally no less overwrought memoirs, mostly to do with the association between the two men. The former translator-turned-foreign-officer was sent to Spain to recruit Pike, in hopes of using the latter’s political connections to persuade Ireland to side with Germany in the war against England. But Pike’s antipathy to fascism has only been solidified by his time in Spain. He fully recognizes the fact that fascism, while pretending to protect an idealized past, actually wishes to control all aspects of modern life, disproportionately punishing any deviations from a very strict norm.
Pike is no fool though, and accepts de Groot’s offer as being the only way out of the horrors of Franco’s prisons. The two men strike up a friendship and more as de Groot becomes Pike’s handler, whisking him off to Germany in preparation for a return to Ireland. But 1940s Germany is a place of chaos where little goes to plan. The straitlaced de Groot is too often defeated, both by the bewildering tangle of shifting political oversight and by Pike’s own mischief, born of a brain that sees too clearly the bleak humor of their situation. Pike, after all, has learned the hard way that picking a side, particularly in political violence, has any number of unforeseen ramifications:
“Whenever we fight for something, we always fight against something, whether we want to or not. Conversely, whenever we fight against something, we’re also unconsciously fighting for something. But there’s no way of telling if those hidden ‘fors’ or ‘againsts’ are going to be any better than the ‘fors’ or ‘againsts’ we think we’re battling.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’m talking about damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That’s the damndedness of choice. But that doesn’t mean it’s all the same. It just means there are a lot of ways to be damned, and that’s what makes up the burden of having to choose. Choosing precisely in which manner you wish to be damned.[“]
Of course, Pike and de Groot are both fortunate in having that choice to begin with, in being able to pass as good upstanding Aryans as they separately or, less often, together work to undermine the Nazi regime from within. De Groot’s main preoccupation is in protecting the man he’s come to love, even as Pike’s behavior seems to spin more and more out of control. But what will de Groot do when he discovers Pike’s jottings of a hidden life spent assassinating Nazi doctors and otherwise fighting for freedom?
This clever, profane debut takes the well-worn trope of not-actually-Nazis and presents readers with a witty but also meditative look at the nature of self-belief and resistance and what it means to turn yourself inside out in order to survive. When, The Torqued Man asks, does the imperative to self-protect necessarily turn, if at all, into a call to selflessness in order to protect a greater vision of humanity? The bookending communiques of the officers in charge of the manuscripts serve to bracingly underscore the idea that we build our own legends, even as the rest of the book encourages us to strive to be better, to make smart, informed choices, and to fight fascism as and when we can.
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