In Fall the journalist John Preston tells the story of the life of Robert Maxwell, owner of The Mirror newspaper group, from his birth in Czechoslovakia before WW2 until his disappearance from his yacht as his empire began to crumble.
Robert Maxwell had many names but he was born Jan Hoch into a very poor Jewish family. He escaped from his home and ended up fighting for the British against the Germans but virtually all his family and most of the people he knew from his childhood were murdered because of their ethnic background. Although Maxwell didn’t often make a thing about being a Jew it is very obvious that the Holocaust and the death of his family affected him all his life.
Maxwell was very successful in the army and won a decoration for bravery. He them seems to have been enlisted into the intelligence services and because of the contacts he made he was able to do some dealing behind the scenes which meant that when he returned to civilian life and settled in England he was already an up and coming businessman.
Eventually Robert Maxwell owned The Mirror although he was frequently thwarted in his attempts to buy other newspapers, usually by Rupert Murdoch. He became very rich and famous and had everything he could possibly want but greed defined him – he ate to excess, he met the rich and famous, he had affairs outside marriage and he was always seeking a new opportunity to earn him more money. But, the author shows us, his success was always fragile and he was continually in debt, he cheated business partners and he robbed one of his businesses to subsidise the others. Just before the end it had become clear that he had committed a huge fraud in taking the pension funds of his workers and ex-workers and using them to keep his businesses going.
Did he die by suicide ? Or murder ? His daughter certainly thought so (he had nine children). Was it an accident ? The author explores ideas about what happened to the large man and some of the theories that have been put forward. He must have known that the end of his success was near and that there was probably no coming back from the position in which he found himself.
Robert Maxwell was not a nice man and he behaved appallingly to most of those with whom he came into contact, including his family. He seemed to have a greed that could not be assuaged. He lived all his life in the shadow of what had happened during WW2. He wasn’t really the success that he, and others, thought that he was.
This is not a long book but it is an utterly fascinating one – an insight into the man and his world.
Anne Is Reading 