Very gripping - couldn't put it down. Read it all morning. Liked the plot, hated the bits written as film script. Also the occasional flights of fancy bits. However his prose is awesome. 'The strip light spanked itself awake' ( )

Stephen Fry in an amazingly clever, mindbuggling book, exploring what would happen if Hitler didn't exist. Fryishly witty and well-written with an excellent story. ( )

not the right time for me to read this book.

A pretty good novel. As a historian, or, rather, an historian, working on his Ph.D., this book appealed to me on one level. Fry obviously did his homework on historians. His bit about deciding on a dissertation topic, or, as they call it in the UK, his Ph.D. thesis topic, is quite bluntly true. The interspersed bits about the history of Hitler and (the invented) Gloder are artfully done. The idea of making it as if Hitler were never born through science is grand, and the alternate reality, the "counterfactual" as historians say, is written well. Take out Hitler, and this godlike Gloder arises and manages to actually wipe the Jews off the map of Europe.

The cinematic chapters, which are fast-paced action montages, are okay - they do their job admirably, but I think I would have rather had standard prose. But, then again, Melville does the same thing in Moby-Dick, does he not? So maybe it's not as innovative as other reviewers say?

Then to the gay thing. Sure, Fry is gay and it makes sense his protagonist would be too. But the protagonist turns from convincingly heterosexual to so unflinchingly homosexual in the last quarter of the book. And it is so bluntly shoved into the story that I feel cheated. You ache that he loses his girlfriend, but then, magically and without any thought he shows up in alternate Princeton and is kissing dudes. What? I mean, the entire homosexual world will tell you that either they knew they were gay since they were kids or they struggled mightily with their feelings, in turmoil until they accepted their homosexuality. So what was Puppy doing running around with Jane? And Pup arrives in New Jersey and, without any inner turmoil or thought, throws himself on a guy who was basically stalking him? Really? Then the fairytale ending? It was a bit too slathered in Vermont maple syrup. I mean, Adso doesn't end up with the Rose and Charlie doesn't end up with Katie (The Rule of Four). To me it would have been far more satisfying to not have the meeting at the end, perhaps a "see about a guy" ending a la Good Will Hunting. And Jane. Poor Jane is the real hero of the book. Turns out she suffered, lovingly, in a relationship with a gay man who didn't know he was gay and she was right, science trumps history, as even the protagonist dumps his Miesterwerk. That bothered me too.

(Funny too, that I read this right after Father Ernetti's Chronovisor, a horrid "nonfiction" book about time "travel.") ( )

This was not the kind of book I expected Stephen Fry to write - somehow I never saw anything so close to sci fi as his style - but it was as brilliantly executed as you would expect from him. Very readable, and I loved his way of using screenplay style to capture the more cinematic passages. (If I'd thought of it first I'd do it myself, but I suppose now it would be copying.) The only thing I would say against the novel is that you wonder about Michael's motives - the suspicion crept into my mind that he really only makes so much effort to put things right so that he can get laid legally. The fact that in alternate reality the Jewish people have been completely wiped out of Europe, and that racial segregation in the US hasn't progressed beyond the 1930s gets very little "screen time" by comparison. But I suppose it's only fair for writers to get to air their own particular hang-ups in their own work. ( )