Ernst graduates from the Frankfurt Philanthropin, a Jewish school, and is employed by the powerful Frankfurt chemical industry. He is posted first to Italy, to learn Japanese and martial arts, and to become a spy. He falls in love with a Japanese woman and when he is eventually posted to Japan, they go together. This is a huge novel spanning 60 years and many of the most important events of the last century. The discovery of the Haber process, the first World War, the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, the rise of fascism and the second World War all feature and form a history lesson alongside the long love story of the life of an unusual family. Its a compelling story from beginning to end and a great read.

I am always intrigued by tales of intrepid europeans travelling to the far east, embracing totally different cultures and making a difference to these countries and history in general. Here we have Ernst Baerwald, German Jewish, starting in Germany then travelling to be trained in Milan then after years of training moving to Japan. So straight away I like the background of the book and it covers plenty of geography and over half a century.
Ernst is born into an elite Jewish family and schooled at an exclusive institution that will provide bankers and leaders throughout the German speaking world. He is more of a wild card than his brother who enters banking and gets ear marked for a future in dealing with German industrial companies interests in Japan.
He begins with idealistic views that providing fertilisers to the developing world will greatly reduce poverty and benefit mankind. But where you make fertilisers you also make bombs. Throughout the book we see displays of all nations and power groups getting carried away in the pursuit of power and wealth and losing track of their original intentions.
I had not realised that the Jews in Germany had been hounded as early as the start of the 20th century and their plight is a steady factor throughout the book.
Towards the end of the book we see that the hopes Ernst had of America becoming the saviour of many of his ideals are being dashed.
But apart from dealing with lofty ideals and heritage the book is a very enjoyable read with all the different settings and the complex multicultural love life Ernst has.
It is a longer than average book but I found I read it in no time at all.
Thanks to NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the ARC

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Speigel and Grau for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

DNF. Although there was a lot of Japanese cultural and historical info that I found interesting, the plot was boring overall and the characters flat. There was also the small matter of the author spelling out the obvious (a pet peeve!). Maybe future work by the author will be better as there was potential but this one couldn’t hook me.

An epic achievement of historical fiction, The Fire Agent keeps the reader turning pages as it crosses genres, successfully jumping from spy adventure to unconventional love story, from sections that read like the best in biography to graphic descriptions of the horrors of war and battle.

Based on the true story of the author’s grandfather, Ernst Baerwald, there is nothing boring in this novel. It is obvious that the author has done prodigious research into the lives of all his real characters, as well as into Japan, China, WWI, WWII, and the early post-war years. Excellent writing makes the multitude of characters and places come alive, but the author is especially adept at describing the culture of Japan and how it changed in the 1930s.

The book opens with a prologue that is essentially a forward-flash describing the devastated city of Tokyo immediately after WWII. I have not read before such a graphic description of the horrors of a bomb-flattened cityꟷa description that on its own stands as a powerful anti-war argument. This prologue is matched later by equally graphic chapters on WWI battles in China and the destruction of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake. These sections are not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach.

But The Fire Agent is far more than a collection of horrific war scenes. The novel draws the reader into a compelling and tender love story and reveals the machinations of the powers of industry and government, universal subjects with deep relevance to current events.

After the shock and awe of the prologue, the first chapter, set in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1900, starts off slowly. The novel gains momentum gradually as the hero, Ernst Baerwald, travels to Italy, where he spends ten years studying with an expatriate Japanese Sensi, then is assigned to go to Japan as a representative of (and spy for) the German chemical company IG Farben. At this point the story takes off. The Fire Agent is a long novel, and it covers a lot of ground. Though most of it is fascinating and the prologue is essential in this reader’s opinion, I felt the novel might have been better without the first German chapter or the chapters at the end about the CIA—as they did not seem to be an essential part of Ernst’s story. Still, the information in these chapters was interesting, and this is only a small criticism considering the immensity and complexity of this excellent novel.

This had everything that I was looking for and enjoyed from the espionage historical genre. I was engaged from the first page and thought Ernst was a strong character and was engaged from start to finish. It was everything that I was looking for and appreciated David Baerwald sharing their grandfather's story with the reader.