The Afrika Reich

In this alternate history thriller, it's 1952, and Nazi Germany and Great Britain have come to peaceful terms after the British disaster at Dunkirk. The two powers now control most of the African continent. Burton Cole, former French Legionnaire and mercenary now enjoying a listless retirement in rural England, is approached by a mysterious figure about assassinating a high-ranking official of the German African territories, a man with whom Burton has a score to settle. And with little more than that, we're off on a rousing, thrill-a-page adventure in which (some of) our heroes survive plane crashes, collapsing tunnels, train wrecks, sinking ships, invading armies, explosions and shootings by the dozen, and other fantastical action show more scenarios of the Indiana Jones-James Bond-John McClane variety. (The inevitable movie should be a hoot.) It's a fascinating what-if premise based on serious speculation into actual Nazi plans for colonizing Africa. In the end, though, it's all just great (if sometimes gruesome) fun; you'll enjoy this more if you don't think about it too much (the action comes at you so fast, you won't have time to, anyway). This is Saville's first novel, and in his afterword he hints at more works on the Afrika Reich to come. I can hardly wait. show less

Recipe for The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville:

Take one Alternate History. Hitler’s Germany has conquered Europe. After Dunkirk, England agrees to a peace treaty that restores Germany’s old colonies (and those of the countries they’ve overrun) to them. The U.S. has remained neutral. The year is 1952, and the Nazis are in firm control of central Africa, and is pushing for more.

Add one Thriller. An international team is hired to assassinate the Nazi’s kingpin in Africa. The plan goes awry, and the team splits up to escape capture and return to safe ground. Hair-raising adventures ensue, with chases, evasions, captures, escapes, and more chases.

Lubricate with one Bloodbath. A non-exhaustive list of violence includes stabbing, shooting, show more decapitating, raping, burning at the stake, torturing, poisoning, and strangling. Blood sprays everywhere. People slip on floors slick with blood. Bodies rot in huge piles.

This isn’t the first book I’ve read that appears to be designed to nauseate. While it’s handy to have the Nazis still around to blame for sadistic and racist carnage, there is still a basic rotten core to the author’s way of advancing the action and to his idea of what will bring him readers. While the pacing is excellent and the African backdrop he supplies (a mix of reality and alternate future) is vivid, all that stays with this reader is the gross violence. Add to that the fact the book has no satisfactory closure at all, and I give it two stars and recommend it only for those with strong stomachs. show less

An alternative history, done well, can be both thought provoking and captivating. The premise in this book, a Nazi Germany victory in World War II has been done many times (The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland to name two that come immediately to mind).

In this iteration, Germany wins World War II when it wipes out the British Army at Dunkirk, the Churchill government falls and his successor, Lord Halifax, sues for and achieves an uneasy peace. The United States does not get involved and Germany occupies the European continent and defeats Communist Russia in 1942. By 1950, Germany has moved into Africa, where it shares colonial territories with Britain and Italy.

So far, so good, with a plausible and intriguing political and geographic show more landscape in which to stage the action of the novel. Unfortunately, the story that follows is a train wreck. Imagine a very poorly done, and even more implausible, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The key players are as stereotypical as they come. Of course, you can’t have a Nazi storyline without the sadistic, misogynistic, blood thirsty SS commander. But the British and American mercenaries, ultra competent, tough as steel, but loyal and tender hearted, and the teenaged, black female rebel fighters, who can slay dozens of Nazi storm troopers in hand to hand combat is a little over the top.

I lost count of the number of times that our heroes and heroines found themselves in seemingly impossibly situations, only to escape in the most ridiculous and improbable manner. Surrounded by machine gun wielding, trained soldiers, our intrepid band of heroes would run away with bullets barely missing, or even grazing them. It got so bad, that I expected our warriors to be the target of an atomic bomb, burrow into the earth with their bare hands and miraculously discover a lead deposit, fashion a lead blanket and shield themselves from the blast. Absurdity after absurdity made the novel virtually unreadable.

Bottom line: Good, though hardly original, backdrop and landscape for an alternative history. Simply awful novel. show less

This novel has everything, well, almost everything, that you could possibly want in an action movie: shootouts, chase scenes, evil bad-guys, ‘spolsions, narrow (sometimes to the point of ridiculous) escapes, and plot twists. It even has the closing, Scooby-Dooish, bad-guys-explain-their-plans-to-the-hero-character-before-trying-to-kill-him scene. And there is also violence. Lots of violence. Gruesome violence. The one thing the book doesn’t have that would make it ready-made for a move to the big screen is a primary protagonist that’s particularly likeable; however, there are a couple of secondary characters introduced later in the book that are actually sympathetic.

The plot itself is a combination of fairly standard action fare: show more a “retired” assassin and mercenary comes out of retirement, and leaves behind the woman he loves, for the one job that could lure him back into action. He gets his former colleague/mentor out of jail to join him in the job, and they head off to the middle of Africa for an assassination attempt. In Saville’s alternate history, however, the heart of Africa has been colonized by the Germans following a WWII where Germany and Britain agree to a truce (which includes partitioning Africa between the two of them primarily), and the US was never involved in the European theatre. It’s a pretty clever backdrop that allows Saville to create a unique setting for the action and to develop truly heinous bad guys, but he goes a bit overboard in the latter. The bad guys are bad, really bad. As in sadistic, racist, amoral Nazis (a lot of those may be redundant, but you get the point). In fact, the bad guys are so purely evil that they come across as caricatures of bad guys. There is some attempt to give the lead bad guy an almost-sympathetic backstory, some of which could potentially make him more human or complex, but by that point he’s such a disgusting character that the attempt falls flat. Saville makes the primary protagonist a more complex character, but the result, for me at least, was that I didn’t much like him other than the fact that he was better—a lot better—than the Nazis, so I rooted for him as the lesser of two evils.

Let’s be clear: the novel is primarily (in fact, almost entirely) an action thriller, and on that level it succeeds fairly well. If you want an action-packed page-turner and can deal with the gore, you could certainly do worse. However, the book sometimes seems like Saville may be more interested in selling the movie rights than the book itself; in fact, this may be one of those relatively rare instances where the movie is better than the book. show less

In a colonial Africa where Nazi "racial hygiene" is leading to a "final solution" to the Negro Question by transferring large parts of the black population of the German colonies restored or established after a foreshortened Second Great War to "Muspel" (the Sahara), a British assassin who has tried, and failed, to kill the governor of German Kongo flees for his life. His adventures intersect with those of a biracial (Portuguese-Herero) resistance fighter in a rump Angola who is resisting the plans of the same governor to conquer that territory. It's a plausible, and frightening, story of a world that could have existed in which we see the heroism of the principal characters turn out to be merely the acts of men manipulated by byzantine show more figures at the heart of empires. There's a tip of the hat to Robert Harris's *Fatherland*. show less

Well, what to think? I didn't enjoyed the plot. I thought it was naive and too far stretched to believe. I didn't like the pace of it all either -action-packed full of gun fights, car races, explosions and else, in books like in movies is, to me in any case, just plain boring. The fact that the main characters are your typical badasses, tough ex-legionaries with that Rambo-kind of mentality just add to what I see as an overused caricature of violence; and I never understood why violence depicted as such could be entertaining. So here we are: not my cup of tea.

However, and here's why I gave a good rating to this, Guy Saville has done his research and, the world he has built here is absolutely remarkable. Tackling the idea of 'what if show more Hitler had won WWII', he not only focuses on the fate of the African continent (a rare challenge to take upon) but, manages to recreate a whole scenario that is as striking as it is believable. I don't want to reveal much (so as not to be a spoiler!) but, from a new scramble for Africa to the use of press gangs, from the fate reserved to Black Africans (and how chilling it is!) to the role played by the campaigns of the Afrika Corps, everything is minutely thought, forming in the background a highly credible and detailed rewritting of history. What's more, this whole terrfying world is supposed to have started at Dunkirk; Saville imagining what could have happened if the evacuation of the troops there had been a failure -and, come to think of it, again, the whole is chilling!

As far as I am concerned then, 'The Afrika Reich' worths a read just for that -what could have happened to the African continent if Hitler had won? The rest, all that gratuitous violence and chasing around, went completely beyond me. show less

Book received through Early Reviewers. Based on historical fiction: what would happen if Hitler decided to take over africa? The main characters are well developed and overall likeable. Story started off fast and slowed greatly in the middle. Quite the twist on the final page...worth the read!