A SCIENCE-FICTION time-travel novel about the Holocaust A science-fiction ...

J.R. Dunn's Days of Cain is both the best time-travel story and the most complete novel about the Holocaust I've read.

Published in 1997, Days of Cain was remaindered almost immediately, and Dunn seems to have written almost no other fiction. What's most remarkable is that, if such a thing is possible, Dunn has given the Holocaust a context. He's simultaneously stepped outside the event to view it from the hills of time while boring within to examine the agonizing detail.

In Gaspar James, a time monitor of the "Extension," Dunn fuses the observer and the observed. Gaspar's duty is to maintain "the continuity of universal history? The base state of the timeline was sacrosanct." The Moiety, a temporal overlordship of incomprehensible beings near the end of the universe, has decreed this, without providing evidence, and established the Extension as a guard against temporal alteration. But the expanded knowledge of both good and evil among the technicians of the Extension breeds renegades who reject their duty in an attempt to extirpate the most glaring horrors.

Alma Lewin, Gaspar's most accomplished protege, has gone over to the renegades, leading efforts to assassinate Hitler. When these fail, she slips underground in the 20th century, into the belly of the beast, Auschwitz, to engineer the destruction of this most evil of evils. When the Extension's 20th-century monitor begs off, afraid of the conflicting loyalties involved, Gaspar is coerced to take over.

The plot works because there's not an ounce of trivialization here, and because the characters, both within the native timeline and without, are fully realized and permanently bent by the weight of experience. Chapters veer between the inhabitants of Auschwitz and the scientific machinations of the Extension, but they remain facets of the same dark jewel.

Alma shows a strength that can only come from an outsider, a willing victim. She knows this and works to add backbone to the "real" inmate Rebeka, who will need to carry on after Alma is (inevitably) gone. Within the circle of their SS masters, the bestiality of Boldt is matched against the confused humanity of Reber, whose one act of bravery will save him from damnation.

What works best in the time-torquing sequences is the confusion that engulfs not only the reader but even Gaspar's crack team. Where are they, exactly, as the gunships come to destroy Auschwitz, and why has Gaspar chosen to be there?putting the entire operation in jeopardy at the last minute? Though never stated, I think it's because, from what he's seen in the maddened declining days of Nazi obliteration, he must witness the destruction of Auschwitz, even though he's dedicated to finally negating it.

At this point, Gaspar stands on the knife edge of rupture. When he acts, he acts on faith. He must accept the assumption that the strange, indefinite beings of the Moiety know what best serves the end of history and that their interests go beyond simple self-preservation?or, alternately, that their preservation is of maximum importance to the continuance of the universe.

He must also accept, by his choice, the reverberations of the Holocaust through all time and his own responsibility in preserving it. Faith is far too little to encompass so monumental an event. Gaspar's gears have disengaged; he will never again be the self-assured whole that he was.