Customer Reviews

The Grapple (Settling Accounts, Book 3)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Plot: Volume umpteen of Harry Turtledove's seemingly endless in his South-won-the Civil-War alternate WWII series. Story picks up after the Pittsburg-Stalingrad defeat for the Confederacy and follows as the USA grinds the CSA down by a relentless drive into Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Georgia. Usual side plots galore on the seas, in Utah, and in Texas, with less on Canada this time.

General weaknesses of breadth: Again, the wider world war is only barely, tantalizingly mentioned.

Biggest strength: Hard to say except it's good to see all one's well-known characters back. Also, one senses that there will (hopefully) just be one more book to wind the series up.

I at least enjoyed some of the little snide didja-catch-that one obscure historic references and real characters in odd places. Castro snuck into this book for a cameo, and Oswald Mosley got another mention. Also, the North's main successful general, Irving Morrel is obviously not Sherman as some speculated but Irwin Rommel.

Biggest flaw: As others have noted-- the endless repetition is one nominee. For instance, I counted over a HUNDRED references to how great CSA cigarettes were and how sucky USA ones were. As if the hundred or so times the last two books mentioned this were not enough. There are also barely changing sequences for many of the main characters, not only Dr. O'Doull, but also Sam Carstens, George Enos, and esp. Chester Martin.

But my nominee for the absolute worst aspect is that the fractured plotline meant the first hundred pages or so were little but reintroducing all the characters and reminding us where we left off with them (necessary since, sadly, HT has scattered his writing efforts so much that this series rates but a book a year). The scattered subplots also make it hard to have a really dramatic, riveting thread anywhere. We are switching channels so fast that no one episode of anything is long enough to be well-developed or hold out interest.

Overall: Yes, readers of the series will want to press on. Although formulaic and predictable and slow, the book does progress and it is better than some of the frankly-nothing-happens earlier books.

Harry Turtledove was once a writer of creativity and imagination. Well, that's history. What's left is endless repetition and recycling of earlier material. Has anyone else noticed that he has now TWICE used the Stalingrad concept in his fiction? (Okay in two separate series, but come on.) Most of this book, as in much of his work these days, is simple filler. I have seriously wondered if its all done by some writing program, or student interns, and if he "oversees" the work and signs his name to it....Look, I used to LOVE his work. NOW he could actually be dead, and still churn out work of the same creativity and originality. I don't know what's worse, if he IS still doing the writing, or if he ISN'T. Sorry...

I've been reading this series by checking it out of the library. I'm pretty glad because I'd hate to be spending money on this series. It really began to lose momentum several books ago. This volume is very repetitive and very predictable. Too little that's really interesting ever happens. Much like in the Great War, the result just seems inevitable. There's no way the South can do anything but lose this war without a real "deus ex machina" turnabout. Every possible movement that could make things interesting -- a Japanese landing on Pearl Harbor for instance, gets easily written out. Instead the two key USA generals simply do no wrong. It is likely that a government run by a maniac is going to have trouble fighting a war, but the matchup here should be closer than it is.

Turtledove has really degenerated into extreme repitition. How many times do I need to hear that the blackout masking tape over headlights only gives off as much light as a cigarette? Someone should be editing this book. It isn't happening and it's at least 150 pages too long (and that's just to tell the same story).

How Few Remain created an interesting alternate timeline, but the promise of that has mostly petered out. I'll plug this out to finish it because I'm stubborn, but if you are thinking of starting this series, don't do it with your own money.

The Grapple is the third book in the Settling Accounts Trilogy, but actually the 10th book in a string that goes back to How Few Remain. Several of the characters have been featured since the second book in the string.
This book takes place in the 1940's in a timeline in which the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 and has been an independent country ever since. World War II is underway, but the alignments are different. The USA (North) is allied with a German Monarchy against a fascist Britain and France and a Confederacy which is a strong Nazi analog. The CSA's blacks are treated as the Nazis treated Jews.
As is characteristic of Harry Turtledove's serial novels, the story is told through multiple viewpoints which give a broad overview of the war, from extermination camps to battlefields in Ohio, Texas and Virginia, to ships at sea. Turtledove kills off a continuing character early in this book, also a Turtledove trademark.
I have two fairly minor gripes about The Grapple. The book, and the whole series, parallel our own timeline a little too closely. The Texas extermination camps are Auschwitz/Buchenwald, Jake Featherston is Hitler, a Confederate Army in Pittsburgh stands in for Germans in Stalingrad, and so forth. Oddly enough, George Patton seems to stand in for Erwin Rommel. For my tastes, this book moves a little too slowly. I'd have preferred if Turtledove had finished the war at the end of this book. The next book of the sequence could have begun with the postwar period, war crimes trials, etc.
Those complaints apart, The Grapple still reads better than most works in the field. Turtledove is a great creator of characters. Each is distinctive. Even his most evil characters are interesting, and while listening to them you don't hate them. The idea of carrying a victorious Confederacy through future years is not new (Bring the Jubilee) but is still fascinating. If you like alternate history, Turtledove is THE BEST.

In the latest volume of his ongoing alternative history series, Harry Turtledove moves beyond the battle of Pittsburgh, the turning point in the war between the U.S. and the Confederate States with which he concluded the previous installment. The Confederacy, which had enjoyed dramatic success at the start of the war, now finds itself on the defensive as the U.S. drives them back. Increasingly the Confederate president, Jake Featherston, grasps onto the slim hope of secret weapons to turn the tide against the superior numbers and resources of the United States, which is bearing down upon the South in a campaign with echoes of the American Civil War.

Fans of the series will find much to satisfy them here. Once more he chronicles events the course of the war through the experiences of over a dozen characters scattered on both sides, though by this point the diversity of experience is much reduced as nearly everybody he chronicles is at the front; home front interludes are virtually nonexistent. The tactics of present-day wars are even more apparent in this installment they were before, as combatants use suicide bombers, car bombs, and even truck-mounted machine guns in ways more familiar to soldiers of today than those of sixty years ago.

Yet while readers will find many of the same strengths that engaged them in the previous volumes, the weaknesses are there as well. While the plot moves forward nicely, the individual episodes themselves have a rote and repetitive feel to them. Characters find themselves repeating the same actions from scene to scene, and even their dialogue is largely recycled from earlier parts of the book. The increasing confinement of the narrative to the battlefield only enhances this, as characters do the same things over and over because they find themselves stuck in the same situations - something that Turtledove successfully avoided in his far more diverse coverage of the alternative First World War in the earlier volumes.

In short, readers of the earlier volumes will find much the is familiar here, as events move down well-worn paths towards an inevitable conclusion. About the greatest surprise contained within these pages is that Turtledove doesn't wrap up the war, but instead plans at least one more installment of his "Settling Accounts" series, entitled "In At the Death". Fans will probably be rewarded with more of the same as before, as the whole series finds a groove that is both comfortable and predictable.

I've been a Turtledove fan for well over a decade now, since his legendary _Guns of the South_ (a classic of the AH genre) in 1992. As such, I've bought every one of his "Great War"/"American Empire"/"Settling Accounts" novels in hardback the day they came out in the stores (including the prequel, "How Few Remain"). Therefore, I think I can legitimately say this; the biggest problem with the series, including this one, is that Professor Turtledove has a lamentable tendency to repeat himself.

Specifically, he introduces his major characters over and over and over again, mentioning the same background and traits in every novel in the series (sometimes several times in the same book!). This is a very basic mistake in that it fails to take account of the fact that people who buy this book will very likely have read the preceding installments and therefore will need no introduction to the characters. I've had a lot of patience for this over the years, but frankly, it's beginning to grate.

Another reviewer has basically accused Turtledove of hiring ghost writers to do his novels. I don't personally buy that - there are plenty of other writers (including, in the AH genre, Eric Flint of "1632" fame, who currently is previewing no fewer than _three_ upcoming novels on his own website), who are just as prolific as Turtledove - but I do kind of suspect that the Professor has a bunch of templates stored in his PC's word-processing program that he hauls out whenever he has to describe a character. Trouble is, as I said before, it's the same thing over and over again, and it's getting old.

It's really too bad, because this is a fascinating counterfactual situation. The fourth war between the United States and Confederate States in the 80-plus years since 1862 is ratcheting up to a new level of ferocity as the USA presses its newfound advantage on a reeling CSA after the latter's disastrous assault on Pittsburgh, while the fascist regime of Jake Featherstone intensifies its effort to make the CSA "black-free" (to coin a grim phrase) and several USA Americans fight an uphill battle to alert their country to the genocide happening in its southern neighbor. In the meantime, both countries are locked in a desperate race to develop the atomic bomb, each being aware that whoever gets a working nuclear weapon first will have won the war. Many people have previously noted the similarities between Turtledove's alternate WWII and our own history's WWII, but in this book, he's beginning to do more of an alternate, modern-day version of the last couple of years of our own history's Civil War.

Don't get me wrong; this book isn't bad. But it could have been a lot better - and the series might actually have been literally a book or two shorter - if Turtledove would just have curbed his tendency to re-introduce his characters every couple of hundred pages.

Several reviewers have already pointed out some of the flaws as well as the virtues of the details of this book. While I found much of this story line interesting, I am left with some nagging doubts.

The U.S. was much too weak both strategically and materially to have recovered as quickly as it did. Regardless of the U.S. advantage in population and apparent industrial base, the series was a long way from showing it had military preparations far enough along to withstand the initial onslaught. In addition, I am extremely dubious of the U.S.'s ability to convert its industrial base to war production, defend itself on its own territory, put down a rebellion in occupied Canada, quell the bloody uprising in Utah by the Mormons, mount development of an atomic bomb, defend against the British and Japanese navies in the Pacific, and the Confederate, British, and French navies in the Atlantic. Keep in mind that at the time of World War II, the biggest and most easily developed sources of oil were in Texas, not California. Since Oklahoma had only been a U.S. territory since the end of the Great War, it is doubtful much exploration could be done by the U.S. especially with Native Americans more sympathetic to the CSA than the USA. It doesn't add up for me.

The second large flaw is the lack of information about the war in Europe and Asia. The occasional, brief references make it clear there is a war. In this volume there is some indication that Germany is also turning the tide, but nothing much else. Based on what we were given in the earlier volumes regarding Europe, I don't see how this is plausible. Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire are surrounded and attacked from all sides. The Germanic access to the sea would be extremely restricted while its foes, Britain, France, and Russia have no such problem. Where is it getting its oil to fuel its military? How is it defending itself against air attacks from all directions? How is it defending itself from ground assault from two fronts? In the real World War II, the fatal problem faced by Germany was a two front war. Since the U.S. and Germany are allies as they were in the first war, how are they assisting each other? What role is South America playing in this? Much more information regarding these questions was provided in the Great War volumes although not enough in my opinion. The volumes on World War II make it seem more like a North American war with some other modest events elsewhere.

Pittsburgh lies in ruins, but the Confederate army is broken and in retreat. U.S. General Irving Morrell has a plan that will break Jake Featherston's Confederacy once and for all: a stab deep into the heart of Dixie, with Georgia as the ultimate goal. But the fanatical Featherston isn't done yet, not as long as his country has the edge in rocketry, and as long as there is still hope of building an atomic bomb before the U.S. does. Yet, even as the U.S. advances, Featherston still puts precious resources into his other master plan: the genocide of the CSA's black population.

My review of "Settling Accounts: The Grapple" is probably more for my own amusement than the enlightenment of any reader. People who have stuck it out for Harry Turtledove's massive alternate history series of a Southern Victory during the Civil War will either agree with me or they won't. Anyone who has not read the series will not start with this volume, almost certainly the penultimate in the series.

Suffice it to say, this volume is probably one of the most satisfying and entertaining reads in the series. There is a strong sense of climax, as the C.S. is left reeling, trying desperately to get a leg to stand on to continue their fight with the U.S. Alternatively, the U.S. has complete control of the course of history now, and the continued existence of the C.S. will be at its sufferance. While it seems quite the coincidence that of the fifteen or so point of view characters, only five are not in Georgia, from a purely literary standpoint, Turtledove's decision to do this suggests that he is orchestrating his final showdown.

Unfortunately, Turtledove's decision to do this does create a little more redundancy than is necessary, as most of the novel concentrates on the front lines warfare. There is little insight into the home front. There is no insight into the air war. Certain storylines, hinted at the previous volume, are effectively suspended here. On the other hand, the battle scenes are fast and furious, underscoring the momentum with which things are falling down around Jake Featherston's ears.

Turtledove also shows his willingness to kill off his characters, reminding the reader of the random nature of warfare. Characters we have followed since the first book, "Great War: American Front" have risen high in the world. Irving Morrell, for example, has become a bona fide hero. Others meet their tragic deaths right here, mourned only by their relatives and the reader, victims of history.

There are the obvious complaints to be made about Turtledove. His characters use the same phrases much too often to be plausible, and that feels lazy. And while Turtledove has shifted gears some, following the course of the last years of the Civil War rather than overlaying World War II on North America, there is an air of predictability about the book. The U.S. will win. The only mystery is what kind of peace the C.S. will have to endure.

On the whole, I think I probably enjoyed "Settling Accounts: The Grapple" the most in the "Settling Account" series. It's fast paced and heavy on action, and vividly detailed, creating a plausible and frightening world. There is only one book contracted for left, so enjoy.

That is, I miss what he once was.

Some years ago, if you read "How Few Remain", Harry was in the business of writing his own books. He took a page from Tom Clancy some years ago (or so it appears) and started hiring writers to complete sections of his books, which he then edits and puts together.

This is never so apparent as it is when reading "The Grapple". The book isn't really a novel so much as it is a series of multithreaded plotlines, made up to form a novel. The discontinuity of the thing is apparent almost from page one.

I've given this one two stars -- one star out of fondness for the past; one that it actually earned.

"Groaners" abound in this book -- from the chance meeting of George Enos and Sam Carsten to the supply of a very young Fidel Castro in Cuba, who's now apparently busy making trouble for the Confederacy.

We are 'treated' to being hit over the head with a shovel many, many times with the Nazi/Featherston comparison - complete with moving Camp Determination in order to avoid the advancing Allies -- er; Federals -- not to mention sixteen (by my own count) usages of the nonsense word "flabble".

The characters are now officially made from cardboard, and in some cases are interchangeable. Gone is any attempt to write for historians or even history BUFFS -- this is pulp fiction; make no mistake about it.

I've no doubt that the final book has been in the 'can' for the last two years -- so here's my take on "In At The Death":

-- Nukes will be dropped; President La Follette said "You will be sorry" in the final chapter. Hitler -- er; "Featherston" will push Heisenberg - er, "FitzBelmont" to the breaking point. He won't produce a bomb.

-- Hitler - er; "Featherston" will speed production of V2 - er, "Assgoblin" (or somesuch) missiles, and wreak havoc.

-- Sherman - er; "Morrell" will push Hood - er, "Patton" in a classic reenactment of the endgame of the REAL American Civil War, taking Atlanta and marching to the ocean. He might even make some "Morell's Hairpins" out of the rail tracks for good measure.

-- Grant (or, by this time, one of the interchangeable cardboard fellows) will push into Richmond.

-- In his own version of the Gottardammerung, Hitler - er, "Featherston" will order the destruction of anything valuable left in the Confederacy; he'll marry Eva - wait, it's "Lulu" and shoot himself in the head while she takes poison, moments before the Russian - er; "Federal" flamethrowers advance on what's left of the bunker.

Have I left anything out?

In sum -- yes; I'll buy the last book. After that, I'm going to write my own.

I think it's time.

Harry Turtledove, instead of taking an interesting idea and wrapping it up in two or three volumes, has made his fictional account of a world where the 1861-1865 struggle between the USA and the CSA has lasted for decades into a cottage industry by dragging out the story line over ten (that's right folks, TEN) volumes! And if it wasn't obvious about four books back that he's adandoned any pretense of creativity then his lastest installment, "The Grapple" makes it clear that Harry's out of ideas, out of steam, but unfortunately NOT out of words.

Quite simply, outside of making a few bucks there is no reason why Turtledove should have written The Grapple. Nothing happens. The story line is not advanced one iota. A couple of past main characters are killed off and a couple of new ones brought forward. But the basic story goes nowhere. To paraphrase Harry, this series should have had it's population reduced about six volumes back!

Take my advice. Rather then wasting your money on this snooze-fest wait until your local library gets a copy and read it for free.