Review: The Sound of His Horn, by Sarban

Review: The Sound of His Horn, by Sarban

by Rich Horton

This is one of the classic "If the Nazis Won" novels, first published in 1952. The author was a British diplomat named John William Wall (1910-1989). He used "Sarban" for his fiction, which includes two more short novels, The Dollmaker and Ringstones, and a number of shorter stories, mostly in the horror mode. There were some additional stories found in his papers after his death, in a similar mode. The Sound of His Horn is, in my view, alternative history, but it's also a horror novel, with certain creepy erotic overtones, and as such it fits in with the rest of Sarban' oeuvre, as far as I can tell. It's also quite short -- perhaps 36,000 words by my quick and dirty estimate -- similar in length, I think, to Ringstones and The Dollmaker (and to such posthumous works as "The King of the Lake".)

The opening line of the novel is memorable: "It's the terror that is unspeakable." This line is spoken by Alan Querdilion to a group gathered at his house in England sometime in the late 1940s. The narrator is a friend of Alan's, who hadn't seen him since 1939. Alan had been captured by the Germans after his ship had been sunk, and sent to a POW camp. He has not seemed quite the same man since his release, causing his mother concern, and not yet ready to marry his girlfriend. And this line is spoken after an argument about fox hunting -- and Alan, formerly a traditional English country squire sort, comes out firmly against it -- despite his girlfriend's support for the sport.

Later that night Alan and the narrator are alone together, and Alan offers to tell a story about his time as a POW. He, along with much of the camp, had planned for escape, indeed been part of a group that organized attempts by various POWs. Finally, he tells the narrator, his chance had come. He and another man have tunneled under the fence, and they are taking different routes to freedom. After a stressful night, Alan is lost, and he comes to a strange seeming woods, and attempts to enter them -- and wakes up in a hospital room of some sort.

Alan eventually learns that he has run into something called a Bohlen field -- an electrified barrier of some sort -- and his doctor is proud of having successfully treated him, as he slowly comes back to health. But the doctor is a bit odd, and the nurses are not forthcoming, and the whole environment is strange. And -- they claim that it is 100 years or so after the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, established the Reich. And this estate is that of the Reich Master Forester, Graf von Hackelnberg. And at night Alan sometimes hears the terrible sound of a horn ..

The doctor finally agrees to show Alan around the estate. And Alan learns the terrible things going on ... the mute servants, all looking alike. The hunting equipment. The references to slaves and Under Races. And then he sees the hunt ... women dressed as cats who drag down deer is just one thing. But there are also hunts of humans ... channeled to a shooting ground. One beautiful young women seems to escape, others are brought down. Finally Alan witnesses the end result -- the captured women, trussed like turkeys, brought to the table to be served to the guests -- for whatever use they prefer. There is a truly grotesque sadistic erotic depiction to this scene. 

But the Reich Master Forester soon finds Alan -- and takes him to be sent, naked except for clothing mimicking an animal, to be a future victim of the hunt. Alan makes plans to escape, especially after he encounters Kit, the beautiful woman he'd seen escaping the previous hunt. I'll not tell how Alan escapes and returns to our timeline. But -- it's fairly clear -- he has not mentally fully escaped. He still remembers the sound of the horn, and the terror. 

This is not a rigorous extrapolation of a future Nazi-dominated world, such as in Jo Walton's Small Change books, or The Man in the High Castle, or even Katherine Burdekin's pre-War novel Swastika Night (written as by "Murray Constantine".) It's certainly not a novel of heroic resistance against a future Nazi realm. It's a dreamlike -- nightmare-like -- vision of a particular horrible realization of Nazi ideology. (Perhaps Keith Roberts' great novelette "Weihnachtabend" is the best comparison.) It's evocative and disturbing and it offers no consolation.