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Making History

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British author Stephen Fry is most well known as actor who has appeared in "Blackadder", "Jeeves & Wooster" and "Peter's Friends." Making History, however, is his third novel, so he can be considered something of a novelist as well. This particular novel is an alternate history, although Fry classifies it as an alternate reality.

Michael D. "Puppy" Young is a graduate student reading history at Cambridge. His recently finished thesis is on the childhood of Adolf Hitler, a person who has always fascinated Young, not because of who he was, but because of the simple coincidence that they were both born on April 20. A chance meeting with Leo Zuckerman, a refugee whose father was at Auschwitz, provides the impetus of the adventure. Zuckerman has a feeling about Young and shows him a device that Zuckerman has invented which can transmit shadowy images from the past. Zuckerman has it tuned to the day his father arrived at Auschwitz. The two men work to build a transmitter so they can send a permanent male contraceptive pill which Young's girlfriend has developed, to poison the water supply in Brunau, in time to stop Adolf Hitler from being born.

The first half of the novel, which sets the scene, varies between being tedious and interesting. Several of the chapters show Hitler's parents or Hitler in World War I and introduce us to a person who will figure prominently in the second part of the novel, Rudolf Gloder. Strangely enough, the interesting parts cannot be said to belong only to the present-day sequences or the historical sequences. They vary without regard to the characters. One of the techniques which Fry uses repeatedly, however, writing three of the chapters as movie scripts, is probably where the novel bogged down the most, especially the final segment where Fry began introducing a lot of background and action which was not germane to the plot, or even a strong sub-plot.

The second half of the novel is when Fry really hits his stride. Apparently successful in ridding the world of Adolf Hitler, Young has found himself as an American student at Princeton. Much of this part of the book is spent with Young trying to figure out who he is and later, what the history of this new twentieth century is. As with the first section of the book, Fry returns to World War I and we get to witness Rudi Gloder's rise in the absence of Adolf Hitler.

Very little that Fry does is unique or surprising to anyone who has read a fair amount of alternate history. This novel, however, is being marketed in the mainstream, however, and will hold a certain amount of appeal to the readership which found Harris's Fatherland an intriguing read. Fry does handle his material well, and even if he doesn't deliver many full-fledged surprised, the moment when the reader realizes where Fry is going with the pieces of the novel is worth the price of admission.

Having read all of Stephen Fry's earlier works, it came as no surpise to experience Fry's usual laser-guided wit and aplomb. While the book certainly earns its place in the top 5% of popular novels for 97/98 [Why oh why did it take so long to release this book in the USA? I had to get my mates in Britain to send me a copy], it lacks some of the style, pace and out-and-out cleverness of his earlier novels.

In short, I enjoyed "The Liar" and "The Hippopotamus" more, and I would encourage anyone who hasn't read Stephen Fry to buy this one first and then work backwards.

The main problem with the book is that Fry seems to lose his way once the main character wakes up in his alternate reality. The pace drags and it seems that the main character mirrors Fry's own fumblings to find a way out of the situation. The solution, when it comes, is rather too trite and the ending sugar coated.

That said, Stephen Fry remains one of the most talented authors around: fighteningly intelligent, excoriatingly funny and endowed with an unfashionable generosity (in literary circles, it seems) that ensures his readers have a good time.

This novel is well-written in the finest tradition of British humor. The classic premise that when we change things we sometimes make them worse is the basis for the novel, and it is served very well, with vivid descriptions and color. I highly recommend this book, but I think that it takes a certain type of off-color personality to really appreciate it.

As an enthusiastic reader of alternative history fiction, I have found that certain themes seem to appeal to writers more than others. Among the more popular ones are "What if there had been no Reformation?", "What if the South had won the American Civil War?" and,of course, "What if Hitler had never been born?" and "What if the Nazis had won World War Two?"

Stephen Fry exercises considerable ingenuity in combining these last two questions with the science-fiction theme "Could we travel back in time and alter the past?" The central premise of his novel is that two Cambridge academics, Michael Young, a young historian, and Leo Zuckerman, an elderly German-born physicist, decide to prevent the birth of Adolf Hitler by using a time-machine to introduce contraceptives into the water-supply of his home town of Braunau shortly before his conception.

Unfortunately, this experiment goes awry. Then second half of the novel is set in a world where the Nazis still came to power in the early 1930s led by one Rudolf Gloder, a man as ruthless as Hitler but more subtle and cunning. Under Gloder's leadership, Germany develops the atomic bomb and uses it to dominate Europe. America remains independent and nominally democratic, but develops into a deeply reactionary society, racist, anti-homosexual and with an intrusive secret police.

This is a clever idea, and Stephen Fry writes with a good deal of wit and style. There are a couple more, very dark, twists of the plot, which I will not reveal. Nevertheless, the book suffers from structural weaknesses. The main one is the decision to set the second part of the book in America rather than Nazi-ruled Europe. (In the alternative universe he has conjured up, Michael is a student at Princeton rather than Cambridge). This means that we never see the effects of the tyranny of Gloder and his successors for ourselves, but merely hear about it at second hand. Nor is it explained why an America engaged in a cold war with Nazi Germany should have become so much more reactionary and backward-looking than an America engaged in a cold war with Soviet Russia. The concentration on the failings of American society in the alternative universe makes the book seem rather unbalanced; indeed, when Michael and his Princeton friend Stephen Burns come up with a scheme to undo the damage by ensuring that Hitler is born after all, one is left with the impression that they are motivated less by the desire to liberate Europe from Nazi rule than by the wish to make America safe for long hair, gay pride marches and Ecstasy.

The second structural weakness is that, although most of the book is written in the form of a first-person prose narrative, lengthy (and key) sections are written in the form of a film screenplay. The two styles of writing do not mesh together well, because the screenplay mode of writing does not serve to convey characters' feelings and motivations as well as does prose narrative. In a film, of course, the bare bones of the screenplay are fleshed out by the contributions of the actors and director, who have other techniques of conveying emotion, but when the screenplay stands by itself it makes for very flat reading. This adversely affects the book in one very important way. During the first half of the book, Michael is heterosexual with a girlfriend. During the second half, he becomes a homosexual and he and Stephen fall in love. Unfortunately, the scene where they realise their love for each other is one of those written in the screenplay form, so the reader is left with no idea what has prompted this sudden reversal of the sexual orientation of the central character, and Michael's sudden conversion to homosexuality seems completely implausible.

Another point that interested me was the tension between Stephen Fry's obvious political liberalism and the deeper conservative theme of his book. The Law of Unintended Consequences - the law that says that in seeking to make a thing better we often make it worse and that the more radical the change we seek, the more likely it is that it will lead to disaster - is, after all, a basic element of conservative political thought, but one that is generally rejected by liberals and radicals as too pessimistic. I wonder if Mr Fry was aware of this contrast- something I would have like to have seen explored more deeply

As another reader has pointed out, Hitler's home town is named Braunau, not Brunau, the spelling that appears in the book throughout. Mr Fry, however, seems to have researched the historical background thoroughly, so I presume that this error is the fault of an editor or proof-reader rather of his own.

The idea behind this book is an interesting one; I would, however, like to have seen it better handled. Hence the title of this review- my grandfather's favourite expression for something done clumsily that could have been done better.

To declare an interest, Stephen Fry and I were at Cambridge together, and I knew him slightly. I doubt if he remembers me (if he is reading this, he is probably thinking "James who?"), but I certainly remember him. I hope this has not coloured my review.

Stephen Fry has produced a novel that not only causes laught but also intrigues the mind. Ever thought 'what if the German's had won?'well, Fry considers this situation. We the readers are merely dragged along with a plot that is audacious to say the least. Hitler is, in fact, not the dictator of the world at all. Instead there is some kind of 'imposter'. The world is actually a better place to be in with Hitler as part of its history. The story sees our leading character dashing in time to remove a pill from the water supply that distorts what we now know as histroy. Inventive to an unpresidented extreme.

If there is one flaw, it has to be the slightly weak conclusion. One feels that there could have been something with a little more impact than what we do get. However, this should not deter you from reading this exellent book. Any weaknesses this novel has are easily outweighed by its merits.

Stephen Fry is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. Or is this book a satire? It's hard to tell. Anyway, he seems to have it in for sophomoric graduate students such as the putative hero Michael Young, the student's girlfriend, flunkies of various sorts, pompous professors, unaccountably gullible FBI agents, German militarists, and the village of Brunau-am-Inn, Adolf Hitler's birthplace. The main characters are so strange, to say the least, that Hitler himself tends to get lost in the shuffle.

The action oscillates between tragedy and slapstick comedy. Young, a schlemiel, accidentally spills some male sterilization pills that his chemist girlfriend happens to have left lying around in her laboratory. He steals them and, with the help of a friend's handy time machine, engages in a little trans-temporal terrorism, poisoning the water supply of Brunau 10 months before Hitler was to be conceived. I suppose we should be glad he doesn't rifle his girlfriend's desk drawers; he might discover even worse weapons of mass destruction, like a cache of atomic hand grenades.

Logically, "Making History" makes no sense. Young is catapulted into an alternate timeline where Hitler never existed. Orthodox time-travel theory prescribes that he stay home and somehow communicate with his new alter ego, but ours not to reason why. The Hitlerless timeline turns out to be even worse than our own: Rudolf Glober, just as diabolical as Hitler and twice as smart, founds the Nazi party and conquers Europe by playing all his cards impossibly right.

And that's the book's fatal flaw: Glober is a fictional character, and his success in outdoing Hitler is unbelievable. If Fry wished to show that Nazism was historically inevitable, his creating Glober out of whole cloth proves the opposite by lending credence to Hitler's essential role in creating the Third Reich and, thereby, to the "great man" theory of history.

For a better-conceived and historically more interesting treatment of the subject, albeit with situations, heroes and villains reminiscent of James Bond films, I recommend James P. Hogan's "The Proteus Operation."

Stephen Fry's third novel is an interesting and amusing (though not as frightening as he would have it seem) re-imagining of what would have happened had Hitler never been born. Twenty-four-year-old Cambridge University history scholar Michael Young has a penchant for the type of fictional embellishing that Edmund Morris was guilty of in his recent memoir of Ronald Reagan. But unlike Morris (and Reagan himself, to some extent) Young really is a fictional character. He still has to pay the price for his creative scholarship (his thesis is rejected by his advisor), but it is this imaginative sense that bears him up for the journey back in time to sterilize Hitler's father before the evil seed is ever planted.

I recommend that people read MAKING HISTORY after Fry's two earlier and more scintillating novels, THE LIAR and THE HIPPOPOTAMUS. The heaviness of the subject matter here is slightly out of Fry's hitting zone and I would hate to have anyone put off perhaps the funniest intellectual writer alive today. That said, this is a fine book in its own right and contains an excellent understanding of academic life (at both Cambridge and Princeton) and human nature. Special points, too, for an opening chapter that ranks among the most screamingly funny in Fry's oeuvre--what would you do if you woke up late for class and only had decaf in the house?

As an avid Stephen Fry fan I was in no way displeased with this book, I just know that he has done better work--most recently with the sensational autobiography, MOAB IS MY WASHPOT. MAKING HISTORY is not a book for science fiction connoisseurs, but definitely an ambitious, well-imagined work of literary merit. You'll be surprised how much you laugh.

Making History is about a Cambridge student, Michael, and a physics professor who, by transporting sterility drugs through time to a well in Austria, create a world were Hitler had never been born. Making History is conceptually interesting, but poorly executed and at times exceedingly dull. Many of the action sequences are written in a screenplay format, which leaves some of the book's major scenes without any narrative description and results in tedious chapters where characters act without discernable motivation. The slower paced, more interesting first person narrative style is abandoned (it seems) in favor of getting quickly through scenes that, though vital to the plot, do not afford the oppurtunity for clever banter or amusing description that the author is so fond of. The resolution is forced and unsatisfying, and there are glaring holes in the plot that are never resolved. Fry is a witty writer, but I think he is overreaching with this book.

What if you could prevent Hitler from taking power? What would you do to prevent it? How far would you go? All interesting questions and Stephen Fry's take on the idea is well worth a read. Although the writing style can be jolting at times and some of the references are kind of out there, it all comes together eventually. Overall a brilliant effort, although at one point one of Fry's characters discusses political correctness and actually uses it in a positive context. Fry must be one of the few people left in the western world who can actually find anything good to say about PC.



But hey, it IS science fiction!

I've enjoyed most of Stephen Fry's books and this is no different. The idea isn't new...How would the world change if Hitler had never lived. Fry's funny style and witty pop-culture references make this a very enjoyable read. It's well researched, well written and keeps you wanting to come back for more. Even the unexpected love story is sweet without being saccharine. Definitely recommended along with "The Liar" by the same author and others.