Word: griffin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...OPERATIONAL NECESSITY, by Gwyn Griffin. This spare juxtaposition of a crisis at sea and a crisis of conscience during World War II is so far the year's best adventure novel...
...under pre-Christian Druidic auspices, though the Marquis de Sade and Herr von Sacher-Masoch are present in postures appropriate to their eponymous status. Gog meets his spiritual twin, an evil ogre called Magog. He also finds a bastard brother, and eventually learns his own name, Arthur George Griffin. A baleful woman named Maire, who has made several attempts on his life, turns out to have been his wife, and she dotes on him because he is so perfectly persecutable...
...Griffin does more than tell a good yarn. He points out the hopelessness of trying to apply humane laws to the inhumane lawlessness...
...crime and the plea recall Nŭrnberg, of course, and other "war crimes" trials following World War II. Griffin makes his point through the U.S. officer defending the Germans. "We talk now of 'war crime,' " says the defense counsel, "but the real crime is war itself and the war criminals are those who commence it or who, having the power to do so, fail to prevent it. We can no more make laws against it than we can make laws against love or fear or hate for it is as much a part of all ordinary...
That is the theme of Griffin's book -but not its sum total. The author has endowed his characters with enough depth, human good and human frailties so that neither victor nor vanquished monopolizes virtue. One cannot, even during the submariners' trial, condone their atrocity. But, Griffin wonders, was the crime any greater for the U-boat officers than for the pilots who bombed Dresden or the German scientists who built the buzz bombs that terrified London? And if so, why? Because the lifeboat victims were visible to the killer and therefore more human than the unseen victims...