Hear My Voice
2019, Jantar Publishing, London
It is 1938 and Hitler is spreading his poison through Central Europe. With the world’s press corps descending on Prague, a young man from London arrives in the city as an interpreter. His world is shaken as he witnesses dramatic and unsettling events. Germany sucks Austria and then Czechoslovakia into its orbit. As manipulation and distortion become normal, our narrator feels his grip on reality slip away. His job is to translate, yet he finds himself lost for words. Truth will prevail, but whose truth will it be?

Read this book. It reminds us about the stakes of doing nothing, of seeing what is radically new as business as usual, and about what happens when the shouters of hate and violence get their way. A year is only 365 days. 1938 became 1939. And 1939 brought war.
I was impressed by the historical detail. The personalities are compelling.
Not only does the book remind us of our recent history, but it has a higher literary merit in that it shows vividly how people can change with time.
Recounts the events of 1938 in a spellbinding way.
Compelling and innovative.
The author cleverly weaves contemporary radio broadcasts into his own account of events. This book makes readers want to read up more on the events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War.
At the heart of this novel is the new medium of radio. Omnipresent yet intangible, it provides a background of unstable, shifting and competing narratives, shattering time and distance. In 1938 radio was as radically new as the social media today, shaping events at every level and every moment, informing and misinforming, making and breaking political careers, creating its own parallel realities.
When I first started researching and writing on this subject over a decade ago, it seemed that I was opening a window onto a distant, faded past that was very different from our own time. Even the word “propaganda” seemed oddly anachronistic in a world where the internet offered so many sources and perspectives. But the warning signs were already there. History does not repeat itself, but patterns of behaviour do. In 1937 the great American broadcaster Edward R Murrow was talking about radio when he said that it “reflects the hatreds, the jealousies and ambitions of those men and governments that control it.” He added that it “can become a powerful force for mutual understanding between nations, but not until we have made it so.” The same can be applied to the electronic media of today.
In 2008, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the Munich Agreement, I wrote Battle for the Airwaves, in which I described how the Nazis used radio to stir up passions, to spread rumours and fears, to put pressure on politicians and diplomats, and to bully and flatter people into obedience. The pressure was unrelenting and consistent, and as their poisoned words seeped into the language of those they were addressing, the unthinkable became acceptable. Truth became the “will of the people” in service of the leader. Diplomacy became a hybrid war, creating realities on the ground by force or threat, and Europe’s democrats, with their language of compromise and reasoned argument, looked weak in the face of forces that seemed to have history on their side. Talk of common interests, collective security and even the premise that “truth will prevail” – the national motto of Czechoslovakia – seemed inadequate and outdated. Journalists lost confidence and found themselves at a loss for words. A few continued to fight for the values they held sacred and some were to pay with their lives.
A decade has passed since I wrote Battle for the Airwaves. As if time were going backwards, 1938 seems much closer today. The word “propaganda” has re-entered our everyday vocabulary. In many places the techniques of persuasion and manipulation used by Hitler and Goebbels are being applied to the electronic media of our own time. “Radio knows no borders” were the words on one advertising poster from the 1930s. The same can be applied a hundredfold to today’s electronic media. The hybrid wars of today are a continuation of 1938 by other means.
Any discussion of propaganda only makes sense if we talk about what it does to those to whom it is addressed, about how it breaks down our ability to read our world. That is what we see in Hear My Voice. This is not a historical novel in the usual sense. The story is not driven by the actors playing out their lives before a backdrop that provides local and historical colour. Instead they are defined and shaped by the setting. They are carried with the ebb and flow of events, they are manipulated, confused, disillusioned, seduced. Some are themselves manipulators and seducers, many lose their way, and a few show a remarkable resilience. The book is built around real events and places, and most of the people who appear in the story really lived. They are journalists, politicians and diplomats, but also ordinary people who find themselves drawn into history at a moment of deep crisis. Although this is a work of the imagination, I have tried to portray them as honestly and faithfully as possible. I would like to think that I would have been one of the few who refused to bend with the times, but history tells me that I am probably wrong.