04-15-2018, 09:28 PM | #31 |
Wizard
Posts: 2,657
Karma: 73864785
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: PDXish
Device: Kindle Voyage, various Android devices
|
|
04-16-2018, 12:25 AM | #32 |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,138
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
|
Advert | |
|
04-16-2018, 12:38 AM | #33 |
(he/him/his)
Posts: 12,213
Karma: 79742714
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Sunshine Coast, BC
Device: Oasis (Gen3),Paperwhite (Gen10), Voyage, Paperwhite(orig), Fire HD 8
|
Well, I managed to finish it today. Yes, the second half is better. But it doesn't make up for those first 2 chapters which were awful. Overall, I'll give it 2 stars. Only because it did get better. The first half of the book would have had to stretch to get to a single star.
Really, the idea that it takes nearly 600 pages to say "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it" seems like just a bit much. |
04-16-2018, 07:13 AM | #34 |
Wizard
Posts: 1,265
Karma: 10203040
Join Date: Dec 2011
Device: a variety (mostly kindles and kobos)
|
I have to say that despite my list of annoyances - it always seems to be easier to list what I don't like - I did still quite enjoy this book. I gave it 7/10.
What do people think of alternate universe books in general? This was the third one I read recently. One was All Our Wrong Todays which missed out to this in the vote, and then The Versions of Us which was a Sliding Doors style parallel narratives (3 versions of a couple's lives). I think I quite like the AU ones where something in the world is different - whether or not it was changed by time-travel etc or that's just the world we're given in the book. It's fun to speculate on the changes and of course "be careful what you wish for" is a perennial theme. I'm less sure about the more personal, this is what might have happened to us, stories. The other one I read a while back was Time and Time Again by Ben Elton which is a story about trying to prevent the First World War by time travel. That's a good read. |
04-16-2018, 07:30 AM | #35 |
Professor of Law
Posts: 3,667
Karma: 66000002
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Chapel Hill, NC
Device: Kobo Elipsa, Kobo Libra H20, Kobo Aura One, KoboMini
|
A Different Perspective
While I agree with many of you that the book was not all it could have been, consider a different perspective.
The novel was written 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, I was certain that it would not ever be legal for me to marry my wife in my lifetime. There were still many parts of the state in which I live that it was physically unsafe to be out publically in. (Though there are still some of those). I wonder if the self-indulgence in this book came more from wanting to write a gay story and needing a larger plot to nest it in. I assumed that Michael was at least bisexual very early in the book, and I was not surprised at all by the eventual conclusion to the arc. It was clumsy, clunky, and terribly heavy-handed, but I understood what he was trying to do. The parallel between the inevitability of a tyrant in Germany mirrored what might be seen as an inevitability in Michael's life once he met Steve. Again, clunky and heavy-handed, but gay storylines in popular fiction had to start somewhere, I suppose. That is, of course, not to say that much better LGBT fiction was not written before this time, because it was. But Fry is a hugely popular public figure and might have gotten more exposure than a lot of his peers. I ended up giving the book a 2.5/5, but I appreciated Fry's knack for voice and characterization, even if I did not like most of the characters. |
Advert | |
|
04-16-2018, 08:04 AM | #36 |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,138
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
I enjoy them very much - but they have to be done very well. The first I ever read was a collection of essays published back in the 1930s, called If it Had Happened Otherwise, which got me hooked on "what if" scenarios.
fantasyfan in his post was I think referring to a famous one by Phillip K Dick, called The Man in the High Castle which I read earlier this year, and I thought it was very well done indeed. So I certainly have no problem at all with the idea of an alternate universe to examine how things might have been different. |
04-16-2018, 08:13 AM | #37 | |
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
Quote:
I quite liked how the romance was handled. Okay, it was not that subtle, but I thought it was actually better than many other thrillers that throw in an obligatory "love interest" for the heterosexual hero. You may be right that he was looking for a plot to sit his gay romance in, and there were some clever elements to this one. And maybe the combination of "about Hitler" and "by Stephen Fry" was hoped to be irresistible (it has certainly kept the price up). But I for one would have started with higher expectations if it wasn't about Hitler ... which should segue nicely into my response to latepaul's post (coming soon). |
|
04-16-2018, 08:19 AM | #38 | |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,138
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
Quote:
My problems with the book were nothing to do with Michael's sexuality, but with his somewhat unbelievable inability to grasp the basics of history, both in terms of what would have happened in Germany after the Great War if Hitler had not existed, and his apparent belief that understanding history is rattling off a series of dates and facts. On top of that, I found him a very irritating protagonist. Finally, I found Fry's "Look at me, aren't I being clever!" way of writing the book very off-putting. It was a disappointment to me because Fry is a person whose work I have enjoyed over many years, and I had looked forward to reading this book because of that. |
|
04-16-2018, 08:50 AM | #39 | |
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
Quote:
I don't mind forward-time-travel so much, that's just a way of creating a new world for some fantasy/sci-fi story. But going backwards and forwards and finding out that in the end it was all supposed to happen just like it did, and/or that the alternative was worse than we have so we change back, has become too cliche for me to really enjoy. Even Stephen King couldn't resist this in his version of this story (he didn't try to kill Hitler, he tried to save JFK, but it's the same basic story - although in King's case he had me hopeful that he'd returned to form for the first half/two-thirds of the book, but lost me at the end). I don't mind alternate universes so much when there is no time travel involved, and when there is no attempt to explain the difference as some single twist of fate. Much better to say, "this is some variation of the world where things are like this," without trying to explain how they got to be like that. The world is too complex for trite explanations to be convincing. ... Recently I was reading some old posts on MR about historical fiction that showed some people have quite high expectations of accuracy (eg: Outlander got some things wrong). This, for me, is where alternative universes can work; they let the writer create something familiar enough that they don't have to spend lots of time explaining it to us, but they don't leave us with the expectation of detailed accuracy. Terry Pratchett's Nation is a good example of an alternative universe that works for me. Last edited by gmw; 04-16-2018 at 08:52 AM. |
|
04-16-2018, 08:50 AM | #40 | |
Close to the Edit!
Posts: 9,797
Karma: 267994408
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: UK
Device: Kindle Oasis, Amazon Fire 8", Kindle 6"
|
Quote:
Stephen Fry is what we fondly term a "National Treasure" over here, involved in almost everyone's daily lives. From the quiz shows he's hosted, the panel shows he is involved in, all the comedy and film work (he's even directed), his audiobook narrations, his excellent work on BBC Radio 4, and his marvellous and frank autobiographies, one is able to forgive a relatively amateurish work as Making History. His heart is in the right place. Last edited by orlok; 04-16-2018 at 08:52 AM. |
|
04-16-2018, 08:57 AM | #41 |
o saeclum infacetum
Posts: 20,579
Karma: 225000000
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: New England
Device: H2O, Aura One, PW5
|
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but another reason Fry might have wanted to hang his story on Hitler is that he lost relatives in the Holocaust. There must have been a personal resonance for him in the fate of his antecedents and what could have been his own fate as a gay man (and one of Jewish ancestry).
That said, I didn't like the romance. Realistically, Steve was a stalker and that's not the stuff of romance. Moreover, the seduction was yet another one of those logical disconnects that had irritated me. Steve stalked "Michael" all over Princeton, taking hundreds of photos surreptitiously. And yet, while they were afraid of being bugged and resorted to that idiotic cover of turning up the music (oh, no, that's not suspicious if someone's listening), they never seemed to have considered that they might be under photo surveillance, also. In that technologically advanced Princeton, there would have been no problem with a motion-sensitive camera and some form of infrared light. One would think. |
04-16-2018, 09:00 AM | #42 |
o saeclum infacetum
Posts: 20,579
Karma: 225000000
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: New England
Device: H2O, Aura One, PW5
|
No other Blackadder fans here? Let's not forget Fry's Melchett.
|
04-16-2018, 09:06 AM | #43 |
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
I'd managed to forget about Steve's photos of Michael - the whole stalking thing. I do remember wondering what Michael-in-alt-Princeton-before-our-Michael-took-over-the-body was like. If we look at the people he was friends with then the expectation is that he wasn't nice, which paints Steve's prior attraction in an odd light.
Last edited by gmw; 04-16-2018 at 09:14 AM. Reason: Removed some excess and typos - pots and kettles spring to mind. |
04-16-2018, 09:33 AM | #44 |
Close to the Edit!
Posts: 9,797
Karma: 267994408
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: UK
Device: Kindle Oasis, Amazon Fire 8", Kindle 6"
|
|
04-16-2018, 10:08 AM | #45 |
o saeclum infacetum
Posts: 20,579
Karma: 225000000
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: New England
Device: H2O, Aura One, PW5
|
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.
Last edited by issybird; 04-16-2018 at 12:24 PM. |
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
For Stephen Fry Lovers | GeoffC | Lounge | 19 | 07-04-2010 01:32 PM |
Seriously thoughtful Thank You Stephen Fry! | Moejoe | Lounge | 2 | 06-16-2010 11:04 AM |
Attention Stephen Fry Fans! | WT Sharpe | Lounge | 8 | 03-01-2010 05:56 AM |
Unutterably Silly Stephen Fry news | Nate the great | Lounge | 22 | 11-15-2009 10:17 PM |
Stephen Fry's Kindle2 is dead | anotherchance | Amazon Kindle | 59 | 04-19-2009 09:41 PM |