(Purchase at
www.amazon.com.au - if residing in Australia.) The author, Trevor Poulton lives in Melbourne, Australia. He was publisher of a weekly newspaper, The Central Victorian News & Review. He has practised as a Solicitor since 2002. He played significant roles in forest protection campaigns during the 2000s, including ending logging in the Otways and Goolengook (E. Gipp). He is also author of a poetry collection titled 'BRICK Through The Window' (2018). Several poems were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals. The Holocaust Denier novel (2012) is a literary novel.
The novel addresses the question of 'free speech' as well as the issue of 'searching for an identity'. However, the underlying theme is: "It does not matter what Truths you discover in life, it's what you do with the Truth."
Under the influence of a charismatic ethno-socialist named Kubizek, Constable Ward Price who is a member of the police force begins to question the nature and extent of the Jewish Holocaust. He trawls through the ashes of the Third Reich in search of truth. Unable to discriminate between places of light and dark, he finds himself locked into a world of use-by dates. In this novel, there are no heroes, whether survivors, perpetrators, believers or deniers
The backdrop is police culture, home renovations, 'Correctspeak' (Poulton neologism) and 'Incorrectspeak' supplanting Orwell's Newspeak and Doublethink. Set in Melbourne, it may be one of the first novels to explore in any depth the controversial inner life of a Jewish-holocaust denier. Questions are asked, and answers are found and lost, with one of the themes being denying death itself.
For some readers it is a crime novel, for others it is Faustian fiction (influenced by the writings of Thomas Mann), and for others a forewarning of the extinction of the 'Killer European'. Through Art (fiction) as opposed to Polemic, the novel explores the character of a police officer who in the process of searching for 'Truth' switches from being a Holocaust adherent to one who dismisses the 'historical event' as predominantly a hoax. He has done a deal with the Devil. And he pays a price .
EXTRACTS:
Ward possessed faith in the self crouched by a stream in an old-growth forest, the sunlight refracting through water flowing over luminous green boulders. And all of a sudden he could feel the completion of king parrots dressed in their illustrious suits crowning the branches of eucalypts, turning the trees into a light and sound show. The muscles and nerves of his body came to rest on a branch of the universe. He was sitting at the centre and at the edge of the world concurrently, as if time and space had merged into one dimension. For half a day on a solitary excursion into the bush he was discovering a position of perfect stillness, and he was a threat to no one. He was a copper with a third eye. Parrots flying out of his mouth rather than crashing into the six-pack of his stomach, he was heading towards the possibility of an eternal reoccurrence. But overpowered by infantile neurotic thoughts, his inner peace was suddenly swept away; the loss was inexplicable, same as how dying birds vanish into black holes. He could hear a wavering cry, amateur bird watcher that he was, for he was afraid that the inner peace would never return. Losing trust in the natural world, his eyes began to close on him. A few hours later, driving back home along an empty highway and then to hit the lit-up crowded city, his eyes slyly reopened to a vision of humanity that conceals the deeper impulses of its parts, a city of smoke and mirrors.
A new humanity is near - Ward had toured around the sun, the moon, and the stars twenty-six times. He had experienced the Big Bang for what it was worth. He had viewed life through a telescope. And already he was on his twenty-seventh trip. He w
