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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Man Who Killed Hitler by Andre Pronovost (view source)
Revision as of 12:34, 29 August 2019
, 12:34, 29 August 2019no edit summary
This is speculative fiction, therefore, of a kind we've seen a lot. I sought this for the fact it didn't do the usual thing, of looking at us and how the Nazis winning would alter us, but what would happen if their own history panned out very differently. If the author had done his homework, I thought it wouldn't matter that it was an outsider looking in at Germany and playing with that particular toy set.
So it's annoying that the homework didn't extend to proof-reading, for one. Germany is not split into ''Gauls'', but Gaus- an unexpected lapse. What I saw printing errors on the first page, and often this seemed did get used to be a was seeing an apparent mix of two different drafts, for it drifted from first person to third in the same paragraph at times. Often times the Baron is reporting his own dialogue, elsewhere he's summarised by an omniscient narrator. A narrator, what's more, who wants us to know much more than normal, for every aspect of the scenario is filled in for us.
Those aspects certainly did show a welcome reach to the book – who knew the Dutch Queen's oil contracts would feature, or indeed Portuguese tungsten? But the way the book breaks out to teach us the ins and outs of the economies of war efforts, and so much else, was a bit awkward at times. It had already been guilty of telling, not showing – the actual death of Hitler, earlier, had been the most blunt, affectless incident. ''Never mind about that'' someone says overleaf from it. OK, then, we won't.
