Book Review: Wedding Station, a prequel to the John Russell novels, by David Downing (2021)

I either picked the best or the worst time to read a novel set in Germany in 1933. Wedding Station, by David Downing, published in 2021, is a prequel to his John Russell novels. A friend recommended Downing’s novels to me, and I’m glad to have finally read one. But throughout reading Wedding Station there were disquieting parallels to modern day America.  

In 1933 Germany, after the Nazis took power, there were groups of SA men, the “brownshirts” running around and beating up whoever they wanted to. The SA was a paramilitary group that protected the Nazis and roamed the streets causing fear and chaos. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? 

John Russell is an English journalist and the main character of Wedding Station. Downing’s series of novels are all named after stops on the Berlin U-Bahn. Russell is a crime reporter, and while he initially thinks that there won’t be anything too political about the writing he does, he quickly discovers that everything is political in the new Germany.  

Wedding Station begins just as the Reichstag fire breaks out at the end of February 1933. This was a pivotal event in the early days of Hitler’s rule. The Nazis blamed the fire on the communists, and it became a pretext for increased violence against communists, allowing Hitler to further consolidate his power.  

Russell is an interesting protagonist. He is separated from his German wife, and he knows that his legal status in Germany is incumbent upon his wife not divorcing him. As a journalist he is able to investigate crimes, but he also knows that there are some stories he cannot follow too closely, because of government censorship. In my head, I cast the Beatles’ producer George Martin as Russell, and that worked well for me.  

Wedding Station is a fascinating novel, full of grey moral areas and the complicated calculus that Russell has to perform in order to do his job and to function. As one of the characters in the novel says, “When it’s in their own interests I find that people can convince themselves of almost anything.” (p.290) 

Downing has a great line late in the novel, as Russell thinks, “Clever could go either way, but stupid was always a problem.” (p.314) The rock band Spinal Tap would surely agree.  

Wedding Station is unfortunately afflicted with sloppy proofreading and editing. I’m always annoyed by finding errors in books. I’m not reading books looking for errors, and if I found a bunch, how many more would a professional proofreader have caught? Here’s a doozy of a continuity error: “Russell was up early on Wednesday...” Two sentences later: “Today was a Tuesday, March the 15th, which Russell remembered from school as the Ides of March.” (p.121) So it’s Wednesday, and then suddenly Tuesday? Interesting.  

But it’s petty to quibble about errors like that, as overall Wedding Station does a superb job of immersing the reader in the murky world of 1933 Germany. Downing’s attention to detail is fantastic, as he takes the reader through various train and subway journeys throughout Berlin. Wedding Station may not be an escape from the terrors of the current political moment, but it’s an interesting read.