THE FEELING OF IRON, by Giaime Alonge; translated by Clarissa Botsford.
Before it became a Nazi laboratory for sinister experiments, the weapons room of Baron Wilhelm von Lehndorff’s castle in East Prussia housed an exotic arsenal including “Polish cavalry spears and Lithuanian infantry pikes, Swedish muzzle-loading muskets and British repeating rifles, crude Croatian Pandur busbies and elegant Austrian kepìs.”
Yet none of these formidable arms, at least in Giaime Alonge’s stunning new novel, “The Feeling of Iron,” will be any match for a new weapon that will be tested in the future laboratory: a tiny orange square, smaller than a postage stamp, that promises the cost-effective creation of a superior warrior class. The Germans call it Lysergsaurediethylamid. It will become commonly known as LSD.
In 1941, at the height of World War II, the belief is that soldiers tripping on acid will not experience exhaustion — and probably not morality, either. Maj. Hans Lichtblau, the Nazi scientist in charge of the lab, receives his first tab from his boss, who is none other than Heinrich Himmler.
Alonge imagines Himmler as a mystic who likes LSD more than Jerry Garcia does. (His appearance here is a subtle reminder that much of the depravity described in the novel was not a fiction.) Under Lichtblau’s control, the lab’s subjects include two young Jewish prisoners, Anton and Shlomo, who escape the castle when the war turns and the Soviets arrive.
In a second timeline, interwoven with the first, it is 1982 and we are witness to another laboratory, this one in far less fancy surroundings: the Honduran jungle. It’s the era of Ronald Reagan and the Contras, and a new war is on, fought by non-nation-state proxies, including an Old Etonian with a taste for blood. Major Lichtblau is an old man living under a new name, Huberman. He has replaced the Reich with a new master: the Central Intelligence Agency.
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