Human Smoke
by Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster, HK$350
This piece of revisionist history posing as a pacifist tract veers between the bizarre and the risible. Among some of the implications - and they are only implications, because the author refuses to take a stand behind any of them - are that America was responsible for the Holocaust, the world would have been better off if Britain had negotiated with Hitler rather than fight Nazism and that China was the aggressor in the anti-Japanese war, not Japan.
In his afterword, author Nicholson Baker says he wrote the book to answer the question: did waging [the second world war] help anyone who needed help? Baker would seem to think not. In his view, appeasing the Nazis would have been the right thing to do.
Human Smoke, a reference to the human detritus found in concentration camps (above), provoked some controversy when news of its US publication seeped out. Now the book has actually been read, the controversy has subsided.
It's just too eccentric and ill researched to form a basis for debate. It has an odd structure for a supposed work of history: Baker simply prints edited versions of newspaper articles he waded through in his Maine home. The extracts dwell on the ferocity of England's bombing campaign over Germany, or report anti-Semitic statements attributed to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.