Laura’s Favourite Book #4: Marathon Man

I don't know that you'll understand this, but once upon a time, long ago, I was a scholar and a marathon man, but that fella's gone now, dead I suppose, but I remember something he thought, which was that if you don't learn the mistakes of the past, you'll be doomed to repeat them. – William Goldman, Marathon Man

Why Marathon Man?

I only read Marathon Man for the first time in my mid-twenties, but I had grown up with my dad quoting ‘is it safe?’ at me whenever he wanted to be jokingly menacing (which was a lot). He was of Jewish heritage and had a mortal fear of dentists borne from a couple of genuinely terrible experiences, so it’s understandable why Marathon Man hit different with him.

I’m not really a thriller kind of reader/watcher (again, my post-war father was very much more in that demographic), so the usual tropes don’t have a huge impact on me. However, Marathon Man perfectly captures the 1970s Jewish experience as my father described it: a generation away from the Holocaust, but Nazis were still being brought to justice. In other words, the trauma was generational and very much had not been forgotten.

So I think of my late father, who was about the same age as the main character, and how satisfying he would’ve found the end of the book (different from the film, which pulls its punches in the finale).

Story

Ostensibly, Marathon Man is a Cold War thriller, complete with espionage, double crossing, torture, murder, secret stashes of diamonds and all the rest of it.

Initially, the story switches between two viewpoints, one seemingly mundane, the other out of a James Bond film, but their meeting is the first big twist of the novel, heightening the stakes that keep on rising via that infamous dentistry scene, to the protagonist proving why he’s a marathon man, and to that cathartic crescendo that earns the book its ‘Jewish revenge fantasy’ description.

Because as I said, Marathon Man is also a reenactment of generational trauma. However, while the main characters are Jewish, that’s not the real motivation in the story. Rather than simply being ‘Jewish student vs fugitive Nazi’, it’s more ‘innocent nerd against avaricious, highly-trained, cold-blooded killers’. The most significant background trauma isn’t even the Holocaust – it’s the death of the main character’s father during McCarthyism, with the further shock of his brother’s murder entangling him in the whole affair.

Character

Honestly, most of the characters are fairly thinly drawn, which is a symptom of the thriller genre, not to mention there being a dearth of women (the one named woman is obviously a honeypot traitor who gets shot dead).

So I’m going to focus on Babe, our protagonist, Doc, his brother, and Szell, the Nazi dentist of ‘is it safe?’ fame. Babe is bright but haunted, resourceful but neurotic. He loves his brother but will stand up for the girlfriend he barely knows. He’ll cross line after line to first survive and then get justice for Doc (and as far as he’s concerned, anyone else Szell ever hurt).

Spoilers abound, but Doc… I was gutted when Doc was murdered. He is our second POV character, who we previously only knew as Scylla, a spy/assassin who is oddly honourable and is in a romantic relationship with his handler. By the time he dies, we realise he’s Babe’s brother and that his handler is another man, which for the Seventies, is treated shockingly respectfully and nonchalantly.

Then there’s Szell, der weisse Engel, based on delightful concentration camp doctors such as Josef Mengele, who in real life just about evaded capture by Nazi hunters until his death in 1979. For as much as Szell still strikes terror into the hearts of survivors who recognise him, it’s also clear when we see into his mind that actually, he’s just a small-minded, tedious, racist sadist. Being good at accents and knowing a lot about teeth are the only interesting things about him – a comment on all shades of bigots all around the world.

Setting

Marathon Man is primarily set in 1970s New York, which is, of course, a vibe in itself, but as Goldman put it…

What would you get if you put an infamous Nazi trying to stay anonymous in the middle of the city with the highest Jewish population in the world?

It’s naturally an intriguing idea, and Goldman plays with both geographic remoteness and claustrophobia to drive the tension, which we’ve already bought into because everyone has an idea of NYC in their heads, just from the sheer amount of media set there. It’s not hard to imagine someone running for their life in Central Park or negotiating their way around the diamond district or ignoring the jibes from the kids outside their apartment building.

Coldharbour’s generational trauma

There’s just a hint of overt cultural Jewishness in Coldharbour compared to Marathon Man, but what there’s a ton of is generational trauma. The Wilde family is one of grisly deaths and dark secrets, all wrapped up in the shadows of a haunted house, as seen below:

Maddie slid onto the chair next to Alex and shuffled up to see the first picture more clearly.

“The only picture I have of them together,” Alex said, gazing at Carrie and David, proudly showing off their best on their wedding day, matching in blue, Carrie looking conspicuously pregnant even with the feather boa draped across her stomach, “my parents. And Harry, obviously.”

“You look just like them.”

There was an avid gleam in Maddie’s eyes at discovering all of these connections, these people, that made Alex’s heart twinge.

“D’you think so?”

“In the face,” Maddie said. “You have David’s nose. So was he Irish? Like Oscar Wilde? Are we related to Oscar Wilde?”

“No.” Alex laughed. “He was Irish-Jewish. That’s pretty much all I know.”

She’d – no, Matthew had once managed to catch Carrie in a good drunk mood, tipsy but not bumping into the table, misty-eyed but not belligerent. “Cork” and “pogroms”. He’d had the patience to coax that much out of her. Two words that he returned to Alex in her room like he’d trekked across a desert to bring her a drop from an oasis. She hadn’t even known the word “pogrom” until Matthew reminded her of Fiddler on the Roof.

“Why didn’t you say?” Maddie asked.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” would’ve been Alex’s response, but she did know. She knew from the tightness in her chest when she just considered digging out the album to bring here, from the pull of utter yearning every time she looked at a face she thought she would never see in the flesh again, barely able to say their names in case she lost just a little bit more of them in the whisper, so determined was she to keep those little remnants in her soul, forever in the warm and the dark.

“Why has your dad got missing fingers?” Maddie asked.

Alex glanced down at the page, where David was giving his thumbs-up, waving with the other hand where the signet ring gleamed on just one of two fingers on his left hand: the middle, index, and thumb gone.

“No idea,” Alex said, wondering if she’d ever been told the story, if Matthew had managed to retrieve another little treasure of a fact from their mother. “Shall we look at another page?”