Synopsis
Motoring with his family to the south-west of France, Thomas Somers is struck with a profoundly unsettling thought: by the end of the holiday he will be older than his father was when he died.
Thomas hates his job. He's plagued with mysterious pains in his abdomen. He drinks too much. Distances open up between him and his wife, even his children. And now this sudden disturbing realization. From boyhood he was driven to do better than his dad - above all as a rival for his mother's love, a rivalry riven with guilt. But he recognizes his father was a better man than he. So how can he, how dare he, win the last round of all and live longer?
Force-fed by French friends, Thomas finds his nights are filled with dream and memory of the man who became and remained a stranger on the day he joined up and disappeared for three years. Blame Hitler! Obsessed with Wellington (the father figure who never lets you down), Thomas leaves his family and arrives, in turmoil, on one of Wellington's battlefields in northern Spain. Here at last he comes to terms with his father's crippling past.
Blame Hitler remembers the men who fought in World War Two, who survived and carried the burden of intolerable traumas for the rest of their lives. It is a comic, tragic, tender novel in which the continuities and discontinuities of domestic life are entwined with history at the sharp end.
From Kirkus Reviews
A vaguely loopy novel about the aging English son of a WWII veteran and his efforts to make peace with his age, his dad's ghost, and his fascination with military history. Thomas Somers, vacationing in France with his wife Katherine and their children, is disturbed to recall that in a few days he will have lived longer than his father, who died at 59. He attempts to stuff the troublesome fact away, but one trouble follows after another. His body already fat and balding (with a small penis inherited, he supposes, from Dad), Thomas begins to bleed from his bowel. His wife and children make changes in their plans that do not include Wellington's Spanish battlefields, but Thomas is so crestfallen that Katherine sends him to Spain alone, with hopes for his restoration. Rathbone, throughout, inserts descriptions of moments from Thomas' past, including hellish school years, parents who are smilingly hostile and loveless, and memories of the war years. Shunted aside by proper society, Thomas has a lifelong sense of personal inadequacyand his upcoming birthday seems merely a reminder of the injustice that his father, after all, was the better man. In Spain, Thomas tromps a beloved battlefield, continues to bleed, and has a cathartic dream/fantasy/alcoholic vision of fighting with Wellington, all while recalling his father's tragic heroism during the war. In saving his troops, Thomas recalls, his father had to allow one man to die, and the guilt broke his spirit forever. There is some oblique notion that, in dreamfighting bravely with Wellington in 1813, Thomas is redeemed in 1994 and deserves to live. Relieved, he returns to his family, though the questions of his bleeding and swollen penis remain unresolved. British writer Rathbone (Accidents Will Happen, 1997; etc.) gives spirited, informed frolic to a boy's fantasies of war, but Thomas' personal crises fall short of engaging. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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