Swastika

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Given the current richness of CanLit, it is easy to overlook its
important subgroup TrashCan. As with any genre, there is good and there
is bad.

Swastika is bad TrashCan. This is not because the characters are
(mostly nasty) stereotypes, much of whose dialogue belongs in
comic-strip balloons; nor is it because we have sequences of paragraphs
of only one sentence. It is not because of the grisly scenes, although
there are many. It is only partly because of a plot that shifts back and
forth between the unimaginable obscenities of the slave labour and death
camps of the Nazi rocket program under Werner von Braun and a manhunt in
contemporary Vancouver for a grotesquely sadistic killer identified only
as “the Aryan” until an utterly unbelievable plot revelation at the
end.

Swastika is bad TrashCan because of its ludicrous length. At least 150
pages, including a long section about Hitler’s last days that has
little importance to the plot and tells us nothing new, should have
fallen to an editor’s pencil. Good TrashCan should fit into a few warm
hours on the beach or a chilly bus ride from Lethbridge to Edmonton.
Michael Slade is the pen name of a brother-and-sister writing team who
tell us that Swastika “was inspired by the Second World War
Archives” of their RCAF father, “who flew forty-seven combat
missions against the Third Reich.” What connection there could be
between these records and this bloated tale is difficult to imagine.
Perhaps they should edit their father’s papers for publication.