[issybird]

At first, I thought this was going to be a campus novel, a la Kingsley Amis. But then it shifted to the overblown "faction" about Hitler's parents and I thought Fry intended the whole book to be something of a pastiche, perhaps even along the lines of Ulysses. That was one explanation for the screenplays, although I also thought they were explicitly intended to evoke action and skip the explanations (just why would this work?). I did not catch on to those early chapters as part of Michael's thesis and while I had difficulty believing the character would do such a thing, in another sense I appreciated it as a send-up of too much popular history today, which is dressed up to be readable at the expense of what is actually known or can be inferred. Descriptions of looks in eyes, tones of voice and so forth are creations of the "historian" (literally "making history") and I really, really dislike them. So props to Fry for that, although the I thought the attempt at pastiche as a whole was a failure.