So you invent a time machine, and what’s the first thing you do? You go back in time and kill Hitler, of course! Except you can’t (TVTropes), because either it doesn’t work or it screws up the timeline even more. Thus resolving one of the burning questions surrounding time travel: if it’s possible, why do we still have Hitler? Stephen Fry tackles this in a best-of-all-possible worlds way in Making History, where his protagonist succeeds in averting Hitler’s birth only for someone more charismatic and cunning to rise to power in his place.I didn’t like this novel at first. I’m a fan of Fry as a TV personality, but the opening pages of Making History didn’t endear themselves to me. Michael Young is such an unsympathetic character. But he kind of needs to be a jerk. One requires a certain level of hubris to think that one should be responsible for changing history, and Michael certainly has that. Of course, a story where one kills Hitler with no unintended consequences would be boring. So things go wrong, and that’s where it gets really interesting.When reality adjusts to Hitler’s absence, Michael finds himself not in Cambridge but Princeton, where he is supposed have an American accent. But with Hitler out of the picture, a more charismatic German rose to power. He reins in the anti-semitism, and as a result, Germany develops the atomic bomb first. World War II doesn’t happen, and America exists in a tenuous state of non-aggression with a Fascist/Communist Europe. In many respects this world seems more advanced—it’s 1996 and everyone has mobile phones and tablets—but culturally, civil liberties didn’t happen. Racism and homophobia are normal; a climate of McCarthyism is the country’s response to Germany’s power. And the Jews? Well, in Europe, they got shuffled into a supposed “free state” but haven’t been heard from since.Making History is a fantastic example of alternate history. I particularly enjoyed how Fry shows the same scene, set during World War I, twice, once from the original timeline and once from the timeline after Michael erases Hitler. It’s an “oh shit” moment as the reader realizes the magnitude of what Michael has done. It’s a foregone conclusion that the new world is going to be somehow less preferable to the old one, but it’s not immediately obvious how that’s the case. Fry reveals more about the new timeline gradually, giving the reader time to acclimatize alongside Michael, who must pretend like everything is cool to throw off some suspicious G-men even while he secretly freaks out and wants to find a way to restore the original timeline.This is a subject understandably close to Fry’s heart, because he has family who died at Auschwitz. And the Holocaust in any light is a serious subject. So it seems like it would be difficult to poke fun at it … and Fry doesn’t try. The humour in Making History is entirely at Michael’s expense (another reason he is an unlikable protagonist). On one level, the narrative just seems to take umbrage at Michael’s ego and conviction that he can make history better. It mocks him for believing that merely removing Hitler from the picture will somehow defuse the anti-semitism and fascist ideologies throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. Fry makes a serious point here, in that often the vilification of Hitler seems to eclipse the more important underlying issues. But he does it with a lighthearted, humorous tone with regards to Michael’s actions and feelings.The way that Fry balances the serious nature of the subject with his trademark wit is the most stunning aspect of Making History, and the most rewarding. This is far more than just another what-if story of counterfactual fiction: it moves both through pathos and humour. I wanted to strangle Michael sometimes, but by the end I was starting to sympathize with him. And while he’s still a jerk at the end of the story, he has definitely changed and learned from his rather major mistakes. In this way Fry reaffirms what is most important: the close, personal relationship between two human beings, and the reminder that we are responsible for making a better world.
"I don't know why I find it intensely erotic to stand naked before an open fridge, but I do. Maybe it's something to do with the expectation of a hunger soon to be satisfied, maybe it's that the spill of light on my body makes me feel like a professional stripper. Maybe something weird happened to me when I was young. It is an alarming feeling, mind, because all those assembled food-stuffs put ideas in your head you're on the rise. Stories of what you can do with the unsalted butter on ripe melons or raw liver, they crowd your head as the blood begins to rush. "I spotted a big slab of Red Leicester and pulled off a piece with my hands. I stood there chewing for some time, buzzing with happiness. "Thas was when the idea came to me, full born. "The force of it made me gape. A mashed pellet of bread fell from my open mouth and at once the blood flew upwards to the brain where it was needed, leaving my twitching excitement below with nothing to do but shrink back like a started snail."No wonder this man can write so eloquently and wittily about penises. It's a great thing it's not just them he can write like that about.Stephen Fry is some sort of homo universalis: a modern day Leonardo Da Vinci, only much funnier. He's an actor, a humourist, a TV show preseneter, a walking encyclopedia, an activists for gay rights, a linguist... an intellectual all around. I had no idea he was a writer on top of all that but it comes as no real shock. One can't resist but nod silently, in contemplation and agreement to Mitchell & Webb's "who doesn't want to be like Stephen Fry?".Imagine my surprise when I found out that the book I had picked from Politeia, just because it had "Stephen Fry" and "History" written with large playful letters on the cover where it also had a picture of a cat, had to do with WWII and alternate history. I was thrilled! It's been some time since I last read a 500-page book in less than 10 days.It was a good page-turner, not too memorable or original, but for a lover of good alternate history and for one that wouldn't turn down well-written science fiction, it was rather good.I know that the best part of such stories, at least for me, is finding out the little details of the "fictional" worlds that have branched out differently. Therefore, I shall not disclose anything but what's necessary to whet your appetite: if Hitler had never been born, how can we be sure that the evil he was responsible for would have been equally prevented? Would Rock & Roll have ever been born? Would Orwell live to write 1984? What would the computers look like in 1996 -- the year the book was written? Stephen Fry in his signature cerebral style includes real historical tidbits on many personalities of the past as well as science and cultural background that make the thing more believeable. It seems only right that a man with a broad range of interests such as himself would be the perfect candidate to write such a demanding genre as alternate history.I'll roll this review up leaving you with this: at one point of the book, the protagonist decides that the format of a novel is not enough to convey the action; the book promptly switches to telling the story by means of being a film script, only to switch back when the heavy action's suddenly over:"I fade from Hollywood screenplay format to dull old, straight old prose because that's how it felt. That's how it always feels in the end.Exquisite.
What do You think about Making History (2004)?
What if? This reminds me of a late-night student discussion of what would have happened if Germany had won WWII, what if Hitler hadn't been born, and what if you had the ability to change history. If you changed one thing, would that make the present better? In 'Terminator', somebody returning to the past changes the future for the better, but even though one butterfly flapping its wings in Japan can theoretically change events on the other side of the world, will removing one major agent for evil be enough to change history, and will the changes be for the better? In this novel, Stephen Fry investigates this premise, when a young man at Cambridge gets the opportunity to disrupt history and experiences a new, alternate reality.The graduate student Michael Young seems the embodiment of a young Stephen Fry himself, with his bumbling incompetence, his self-deprecation and his assumed persona of cool dude which masks his other-worldliness. In one respect he is different, however, as he's living with his efficient and rational girlfriend. The author himself comes to mind in passages such as this where Michael says, "History isn't my business at all. I managed at least, to stop myself from describing history as my 'trade', for which I reckon I can award myself some points. History is my passion, my calling. Or, to be more painfully truthful, it is my field of least incompetence." Even though Stephen Fry was a literature graduate, I can only too well imagine him saying this. In the second half of the book, where Michael is immersed in his new reality, this is less apparent, as he exercises his brain to find his feet in a world where much seems the same and yet things have, at a day-to-day level, subtly changed, and the world stage is radically altered. It turns out that progress takes a different path if different people do not meet or different resources are available in a different place. History does not revolve around one person, however influential that person may be. One voice shouting in the wilderness cannot lead a revolution. History is not a void, and evil ideas such as the Holocaust came into existence because of the existing social and economic pressures, not simply because Hitler was a great orator.This is very entertaining book, told with Stephen Fry's usual snippets of fascinating information, some good background information about WWII which I have to admit I read without retaining and some musings about an eclectic range of subjects. I didn't like the way in which he wrote the more action-packed sections in the form of a screenplay, as I found that more difficult to read than straight prose, and at times he slipped in more text than strictly necessary for a script, explaining the characters' feelings. It was interesting to see his portrayal of the WWI trenches and to wonder if he was assigning the roles to particular actors from the 'Blackadder Goes Forth' series; I couldn't help imagining Schmidt as the Baldrick character, the naive hero-worshipper, and Gloder as Blackadder, sending somebody else to do the hard work then taking all the credit. Blackadder came out in 1989, so 'Making History' came much later, in 1996. In the later chapters of the alternate reality, it was interesting to compare their technology with the reality of the time and to realise that the speech recognition software is probably now available to make this current reality, something which was not the case in 1996.Having given up on Fry's 'The Hippopotamus' after only a few pages due to his insistence on bad language, I am glad to be able to read one of his novels. It was perhaps less literary than I had expected, more full of pop culture references, and I did indeed, as the quotation from the back cover suggests, let the tea go cold. Which begs the chicken-and-egg question, which came first, the cover of a cat watching a goldfish or the quotation from The Independent, "A powerful imaginative pull that keeps the pages turning while the tea goes cold and the cat gets the goldfish?Finally, I highly recommend this video of Stephen Fry talking about 'Making History': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uom7-...
—Bookguide
Okay, I'll say this outright: this is not a bad book - it just wasn't for me.Way too many things in it I didn't like. The too-cutesy-by-half romance plot and its resolution, the writing style, the also too-cutesy-by-half "movie script" inserts. I also didn't like the mucking around joke tone the book took. It somehow managed to miss the mark, for me, both on the funny and the serious side; it ain't Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, that's for sure.The continuous frivolous asides to show how humorous and inept the main character is really bugged me, for some reason. By the time I got to the middle of the book, I was ready to tear my hair out. then it actually got better, but still...It may have helped, had I not finished the book on Holocaust Memorial Day, as a point of fact. As it is, though, I did, and I am sure that did something to my impression of it.Mind you, as I say again, other people might really like this bok, and obviously did. It just... wasn't the right book at the right time, or something.
—Genia Lukin
The book started well enough, young chap at Cambridge (Fry's alma mater) immersed in the history of Hitler, working towards spending his life at Cambridge in a paid capacity, is having a tough time with his hard-nosed scientist girlfriend who finally leaves him (I found her more interesting than our hero, stronger, and more capable of carrying a story, and was sorry to see her go). Young man makes a hash of his thesis, dissertation, whatever, by being way too inventive for historical research, but bumps (literally) into a physics prof. who catches sight of his subject matter, becomes very excited, and shows our young hero why. For his own reasons, he too is obsessed with Hitler and is working on a way to change the course of history, basically to assuage his own familial guilt. With the young man's detailed knowledge of Hitler's early life, the physics professor's project becomes much easier. And so these two set about making sure Hitler is never born. Fry's idea is that mass events will happen no matter who, or who is not, there...they will simply be somewhat different. Therefore, even without Hitler, the basic impulse of the time is achieved through a different cast of characters. Only worse. That was interesting, interesting enough to keep going with the story. The writing was a bit clever-clever, but not too clever, actually I expected more from such a celebrated wit (no Oscar Wilde here)...and towards the end became rather sophomoric, as did Fry's completely unnecessary descent into an alternative love story way out of character for our young hero, even understanding that he too changed when the world changed. It wasn't necessary for the story, just seemed sort of stuck on as an amusement/fantasy for Fry. In fact, the last fifty pages were juvenile and rushed. In the hands of deeper thinker and a better sci-fi writer, this might have been very good. But it petered out along the way as Fry's grasp of his material also petered out. He really didn't know what to do with everyone when they'd achieved their goal, so thrashed his way out in a very unlikely comic book fashion.
—Hugh Malcolm
