Making History

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As to Leo Zuckerman, his guilt felt real, which really added to his motivation for doing what he did. 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. Proposed screenplays joust with dryly written history, academese wrestles with Michael's cheeky speech. Therefore, even without Hitler, the basic impulse of the time is achieved through a different cast of characters.

Part academic send-up, part zany screenplay, and part intriguing invented history, the novel dives headfirst into the trashbin of history and roots around with alternating elan and solemnity. The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother.I am aware that my extreme aversion to this literary device is subjective – probably connected to the fact that books are my first and major love, while films are okay, I suppose…. The best part of the book was the alternate world that Fry imagined, with a very different outcome to the Second World War from the one we know.

These early such chapters depict Hitler's father, an abusive husband and father and a petty tyrant in his job as a customs inspector; Hitler's mother, a gentle and sensitive woman escaping into fantasy from the harsh reality of her life; the 10-year old Adolf Hitler standing up to his father. There are numerous World War II alternative history texts wherein events during the war occurred differently from those in history. He gives up his career in academia, figuring he can at least make some money "writing" the songs that he remembers from the previous reality. It was written really well, but not something I would have engaged with if it had been by any other author.

I know that a New York Times reviewer, who gave me a savaging for the book, had no idea I was Jewish and thought I was just a clever English white man, playing games with something as wicked as the Holocaust. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay.

The heart-wrenching truth and circumstances surrounding the darkest period of human history and just the very idea of rewriting life as we know it, already gave a plethora of moments where I had to keep the book aside to digest the narrative. In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world. Having said that though, I am not convinced that Young's comic actions and immaturity were necessarily the best means to relay such an interesting theory. The ending is lovely - and makes me wonder if we could see this as a "Wizard of Oz" dream sequence where our protagonist realizes what he really wants at the end, and seizes it. Other irritations included the way the story occasionally turns into a film script, and the way that in the sections dealing with Germans, the English text is larded with German words.Thus resolving one of the burning questions surrounding time travel: if it’s possible, why do we still have Hitler?