As the world comes to feel ever weirder, ever more random, it’s little wonder that more and more people are turning to the reassuring orderliness of conspiracy theories to make sense of it. QAnon, the great replacement theory, the great reset, Bill Gates and his microchips …
Come in and Shut the Door is very much a tale for our feverish times, a novel about strange connections, alternative facts and hidden histories. The writer and film-maker Chris Petit (Radio On, his 1979 cult British road movie, is much admired by people who dress all in black) starts his tenth novel in humdrum enough fashion with Parker, a nervous young man, going for a job interview in Kilburn. But the book makes its way through time and place to Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker. There, in that dismal setting, we observe senior Nazis discussing what to do with the spent, drugged-up Hitler. No plot spoilers, but the last moments of Hitler and Eva Braun are in this telling very different from the established facts.
Petit has Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s spin doctor, declare: “Muddy the waters! Complicate things! An alternative ending, the honourable death announced, then a hint of grand mischief. A sleight of hand, body doubles, forensic detail, abracadabra, the suggestion of a nick-of-time escape and the possibility that, Houdini-like, they might yet be alive … and the legend lives on!”
Mischief and muddying the waters is the name of the game in this novel full of oddities. It features a cameo of Jimmy Savile (hiding in plain sight), coke-addled Russian oligarchs, Eric Burdon from the Animals meeting an SS judge, child-abusing monks, the CIA man James Jesus Angleton, and David Bowie, pop legend and keen collector of Nazi memorabilia. It’s all very byzantine and bizarre and had me googling things like “did Joan Crawford appear in a porn film called Torture Me with Your Finger?” (no) and “Did the film director John Huston masturbate a monkey?” (actually, I didn’t dare search for that on a company laptop).
Parker is an innocent. He has just left a seminary after a crisis of faith. He has no particular skills, although he does have offputting psoriasis and a terrible psychic wound from childhood. The only person who thinks he is employable is the mysterious Robinson, who put an ad for a Man Friday in the Evening Standard’s classifieds.
When we meet Robinson, both his hands are in plaster (the cause of the “bust wrists” is uncertain) and he needs someone to do chores. Robinson is a devilish, beguiling, scene-stealing figure. “I can never tell whether he’s bankrupt or loaded,” a friend says. He seems to be avoiding some crazy Russians to whom he owes money, possibly for a never-made epic western filmed in Siberia. His exact line of work is hazy but he does deal in Nazi artefacts.
Soon enough, Parker is helping Robinson to track down some particularly juicy material from the end of the war. This search provides the novel with a spine, but we also go backwards, learning about the wartime lives of Robinson’s father, a bomber pilot and crook, and Parker’s grandmother, a German exile who becomes involved with a black propaganda radio station, and the connections between the two.
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It’s fascinating to wander round Petit’s baroque imagination. But, like being in a bunker or a bomber cockpit, the experience becomes claustrophobic. There is an obsessive quality to Petit’s writing. Characters recur in his books as if he can’t quite finish with them. August Schlegel, a fictional SS officer, and Konrad Morgen, a real-life SS judge, also appear in his historical thrillers The Butchers of Berlin and Pale Horse Riding. Petit’s first novel, a Soho tale of blue movies, booze and sleaze, is called Robinson after its enigmatic main character. His best known novel, The Psalm Killer, is a study in paranoia and psychopathy during the Troubles in the 1980s; Robinson’s father, we learn, was a policeman who picked up his torturing skills in Northern Ireland — “white noise, headphones for the blokes doing it and a Sainsbury’s plastic bag (or maybe it was Tesco, or even Asda, definitely not Waitrose)”.
When I finished Come in and Shut the Door (terrible title, by the way — it sounds like a catchphrase from a 1970s sitcom), my main sensation was: what was that all about? I felt like I’d been lost down a rabbit hole for a couple of days. I enjoyed Petit’s tour of the darkest corners of history, but has he loosened my screws?
Come in and Shut the Door by Chris Petit (Scribner UK £18.99 pp406). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
