In this novel, Fry gives rein to his vivid imagination and keen penchant for detail as to human quirks and personalities in a variety of settings and historical periods.
The novel
is organized into Book One and Book Two.
The
protagonist and narrator in both books is Michael Young, a child prodigy with a
great natural fascination with history, who becomes a student (two years in
advance of the typical age) at England’s Cambridge University. In Book One, Mike introduces us to his
chemistry graduate student girlfriend, Jane (who calls Mike, “Pup,” originating
in a story of Mike’s youth in which a misunderstood pronunciation of
Shakespeare’s character, “Puck,” becomes the name embraced by Jane), with whom
he jousts as to the relative importance of history and the natural sciences as
object of academic focus. Mike is
insecure as to Jane’s devotion and is unsettled when she accepts a fellowship
for study at Princeton University in the United States and departs without
informing him of the development, though he comes to learn that she remains
interested in continuing their relationship.
We also
meet Cambridge students Edward Edwards (“Double Eddie”) and James MacDowell,
gay paramours who are as important as part of the English University landscape
and their role in conveying enlightened social attitudes as for their
interactions with Mike.
Mike
conveys to the reader considerable skepticism that he has developed as to the
university environment, in which he finds professors as interested in tenure
and professional status as in the scholarship for which they angle to be known.
Tension in the academic setting is
prominently witnessed, also, in his exchanges with his dissertation adviser, supercilious
Professor Alexander Hugh-Stewart, who is not amused at the zippy popular
insertions that accompany the more straightforward scholarly presentation in
what Mike alternately proudly and satirically dubs his masterwerk: From
Bayreuth to Munich: The Roots of Power. The dissertation details, with combination of
firm fact and deft conjecture based on the shreds of evidence discovered in
meticulous research, the story of Adolf Hitler’s life from birth up to that
historical juncture he successfully maneuvers to take power in 1930s Germany.
Fry
utilizes an innovative approach in advancing the plotline of the novel that
includes not only Mike’s first-person narrative but also events revealed in
cinematic script, as well as in third person prose. The latter authorial form is utilized in
conveying scenes from Hitler’s life as a child of Alois and Klara Hitler and as
a gefreiter (corporal) in World War I.
With most
major characters introduced and the Cambridge setting established, Fry focuses
increasingly on the terrors and lingering trauma of the Nazi regime, especially
after Mike meets a person whom he at first knows as Leo Zuckerman, a physics
professor at the university. Gradually,
though, Mike comes to understand that the real name of the professor is Axel
Bauer, son of Marthe and Abel Bauer; the
latter was a brilliant physician in the service of the Nazi regime, including
as adviser on the efficacy of chemicals used to exterminate captives at
Auschwitz. But as the war turns against
Germany, Abel facilitates the emigration of Marthe and Abel under the
identities Hannah and Leo Zuckerman, to the United States. As the Nazi regime falls, Abel is executed. Leo, though, only six years of age at the
time of his arrival in the United States, is convinced by Marthe that his
father was a courageous Jewish doctor who resisted the Nazis; only on her deathbed, while Axel is a student
at Columbia University, does he come to know the true familial story.
Axel
retains the identity of Leo Zuckerman but is haunted with guilt. He secures the assistance of Mike, combining
the latter’s knowledge of the Nazi regime and world history with his own
esteemed scientific expertise to construct a computer device (dubbed, “TIM,”) with
the capability of eliminating Hitler from history. With explosive apparent success, TIM does
remove Adolf Hitler from the historical record, but in the process--- the reader discovers as Boot Two
opens--- transports Mike into the
entirely different setting of Princeton University in a significantly altered
history far beyond the erasure of Hitler.
Germany remains powerful in the postwar world, dominating the European
nations, which now have a tense relationship with a United States that also
manifests many authoritarian tendencies.
Mike
recognizes many faces on the Princeton campus as those he knew at Cambridge,
but they have different names and
attitudes that reveal a far less progressive political and cultural climate,
including on issues such as gay relationships.
Many cultural icons that Mike knew as prominent in the United States and
the Western world are not known in the altered postwar world. And worst of all, Mike finds out that not
only did Germany emerge from World War II with much power maintained, the
person who ruled instead of Hitler was a character, Rudi Gloder, introduced as
a self-promoting gefreiter in Book One and in Book Two revealed even more
to be much like Hitler in background, temperament, and character.
Eventually,
Mike comes to know a Princeton physics professor Chester Franklin, who turns
out to be a transported Leo Zuckerman (Axel Bauer). Mike and Axel work through their fuzzy
memories of the life that they knew at Cambridge to agree that their experiment
with TIM made life actually worse. With
the help of a facially and by personality new character, Steve Burns (fellow
student and friend of Mike), Mike and Axel reconstruct a device potentially
able to return humanity to those known while the two were at Cambridge. Burns helps the two gather materials for the
device and to fend off suspicious detectives investigating Mike, whose name and
physical appearance were known at Princeton but whose sudden acquisition of a
British accent and odd cultural references had aroused suspicion.
The new
experiment appears to work:
Mike and
Zuckerman (Bauer) return to Cambridge and the people, places, and culture that
they had known. Jane, who had never
surfaced during Mike’s transported experience at Princeton, eventually does
make contact from that city and university under the circumstances of her
fellowship and vows her continuing love for Mike. A complicating factor in Mike’s love life,
though, may come with the only major revealed change upon return to
Cambridge: Steve Burns, a gay young man
who had developed a flirtation with Mike at Princeton, appeared to have died by
gunfire in fending off the detectives when the latter arrived on the scene just
as Mike and Zuckerman (Bauer) were finalizing their second experiment in
historical alteration; but at novel’s
end, Steve reveals himself to have also been transported to Cambridge and ready
to explore life under the original historical conditions as described by Mike
back at Princeton.
In this
very well-written and enormously entertaining novel, Fry advances the case
against the Great Man concept in history and very well may succeed in altering
or confirming many readers’ views on the matter.
He does
not convince me, though:
Magnetic
personalities and skillful operators, in combination with historical
circumstances conducive to the utilization of their talents, do in my view have
determinative impact on history. Rudolph
Gloder had a different name but life circumstances and personality approaching
an identity with that of Hitler. Those particular
life circumstances induced the development of the unique personality that
appeared on the scene and rose to power by exploiting the vulnerability of the German
populace in the late Weimar era.
Whether
the person be called Adolf Hitler or Rudi Gloder is not consequential; rather, the personality, in combination with
prevailing historical circumstances does have determinative consequences.
Great Men, Great Women, Particular Personalities:
They indeed matter very much.
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