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This book was a great disappointment for me. I thought the best part was the alternate world that Fry imagined, with a very different outcome to the Second World War from the one we know. But like Dazrin and gmw, I did wonder why what happened in Europe should lead to a homophobic America.
I found the protagonist incredibly irritating, though I was presumably supposed to find him charming. For someone who is a PhD candidate in history at Cambridge University, his inability to see that removing Hitler from the picture would not change the disastrous situation in Germany after the First World War, and that of course some other leader would emerge, was frankly unbelievable, despite his immaturity. Had he learned nothing from several years of reading history?
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. This makes as much sense as the old films where Germans (or other nationalities) spoke to each other in English with heavy accents so that we would know they were really speaking in German or French or whatever.
Barely two stars for me, one being for the alternate outcome for Europe that Fry imagined and described well and succinctly. I certainly wouldn't be recommending the book to anyone to read, and I doubt I shall read anything else by Stephen Fry.
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