Making History

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Together, with the help of some little orange male infertility pills and some high-tech gadgetry, they set out to alter history. He really didn't know what to do with everyone when they'd achieved their goal, so thrashed his way out in a very unlikely comic book fashion. Michael learns that the water from the well in Hitler's home town was used to create "Braunau Water", which was the instrument to sterilise the European Jews, wiping them out in one generation. One requires a certain level of hubris to think that one should be responsible for changing history, and Michael certainly has that.

That result could not have been achieved solely by sterilizing Jewish men through the "Braunau Water".

For one, I realised how unusual it is to read a WWI account (even tho fiction) from a German perspective.

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 think anyone interested in history would find this an interesting read - if they can push through the beginning (should it not appeal). The imagination is helped along at times by the clever use of almost a screenplay type script, very cleverly used to aid communication between author's minds and the readers. What is more, Fry did this rather well and without resorting to a lot of stereotyping or using cliches. 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 year before I had been in a West End play which I had left, rather embarrassingly, and fled to Europe, causing rather a stink.

Every chapter told by the first-person narrator in the (changing) late 20th century reality is followed by one in the German past. He is the bestselling author of four novels - The Stars' Tennis Balls, Making History, The Hippopotamus and The Liar - as well as three volumes of autobiography - Moab is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles and More Fool Me. Having said that, up to the point it all went Courier I found the depiction of the alternate world engrossing and chilling in equal measure. In this alternative timeline, the Nazis won a mandate in the Reichstag in 1932 and built up an electronics industry of their own. Fry makes a serious point here, in that often the vilification of Hitler seems to eclipse the more important underlying issues.The only interesting approach is that Fry tries to imagine what the consequences would be of attempts to change history, but even that is poorly executed.