In the build-up to the Iraq war it was standard for the neoconservatives to liken critics of military action to the Nazi appeasers of 1930s England. The analogy between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Adolf Hitler's Germany was absurd, but the notion that the second world war was a 'good war' went unquestioned. It is the foundation of the United States' self-image as the bastion of the free world.
But in Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilisation, American novelist Nicholson Baker calls the necessity of the second world war into question. He assembles a chronological montage of several hundred vignettes, pulled from newspapers, diaries, memoirs and speeches from the years leading up to 1942 when, the book argues, civilisation collapsed.
In this fragmentary account of the war's origins, the western powers emerge as no less bloodthirsty and anti-Semitic than the Nazis. The isolated snippets of information are presented without any context, so it's only from our pre-existing knowledge of the war that we see the Allies as the force of good. Human Smoke has become a best-seller in the US and drawn praise from the likes of Colm Toibin and Simon Winchester. But it has been savaged in the conservative press as 'profoundly dangerous' (London's Evening Standard) and 'not just a stupid book, but a scary one' (The New York Sun).
The second world war is a surprising topic for an author predominately known for short, plotless novels of minutiae observation. His debut novel, The Mezzanine (1988), is 133 pages of microscopic detail of an office worker's thoughts while riding the escalator to work. In subsequent novels such as Room Temperature (1990) and A Box of Matches (2003) Baker further established himself as an elegist of everyday objects - paper towels, earplugs, pillows, milk cartons and peanut-butter jars.
His passion for seemingly banal artefacts infuses his 1996 essay collection The Size of Thoughts, which includes an examination of the books used as background props in clothing catalogues, a 150-page exploration of the word 'lumber', and an essay on the fingernail clipper. The last was inspired by Stephen King's comparison of Baker's 1992 work Vox, a fictional phone-sex dialogue, to a 'meaningless fingernail paring'.
From his farmhouse in Maine, Baker, 51, says the theme of rescue is central to his work. 'I like the idea of rescuing the little ideas that you haven't quite put a frame around, and preserving in prose physical objects that seem valuable.' Human Smoke is an attempt to resurrect forgotten pacifist voices - 'to rescue from obscurity some of the people from before the second world war who were trying to help'.
Human Smoke suggests US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbour in advance and obstructed efforts to raise immigration quotas for Jewish refugees. It finds Roosevelt in his student years agitating for a Jewish quota at Harvard after noticing 'that Jews made up one-third of the freshman class'. The book shows the effect of Britain declaring war was to cut off Jewish escape routes.