Making History by Stephen Fry

Twenty four year old Michael Young, who reads history at Cambridge, is just about to submit his doctoral thesis when his bag accidentally opens, sending a bazillion papers flying across a parking lot. An elderly gentleman who comes to his assistance is fascinated by the subject of Michael’s meisterwerk – the early life of Adolf Hitler. However, his thesis is absolute codswallop with fictional embellishments such as the olfactory experiences of Klara, Hitler’s mother, whilst drawing water from a well. The old man turns to be Professor Zuckerman, a renowned physicist. With a shared interest in Hitler, Michael and Zuckerman become close. We then find out that Zuckerman is in fact not a Jew, but the son of an SS guard from Auschwitz, a fact that is revealed to him by his mother on her death bed. Zuckerman feels intensely guilty about this and senses the need to right the wrongs of the past. As a result, he’s been working on TIM, a prototype of a time machine where a place and time in the past can be viewed as fuzzy colours on a screen (I didn’t get this). Michael convinces Zuckerman that TIM could be used for a two way interaction. Michael steals a load of untested extra strong male contraceptive pills from his geneticist girlfriend. The physicist and historian then use TIM to access the village where Hitler was born, a year before his birth, dumping the contraceptives into the fuzzy blob they identify as the Hitler family water supply (I really didn’t get this). Naturally, the puerile premise is ‘no Hitler, no holocaust’.

Consequently, Michael discovers that you can’t alter history but history can definitely alter you. He wakes up in an alternate reality as an American studying philosophy at Princeton, with straighter teeth, firmer pecs and a circumcision. In this world, Germany controls all of Europe having nuked Russia out of existence and there’s a cold war on between the United States and the Reich. Instead of Hitler, some Charlie named Gloder gets the credit for mass murder. The remainder of the book is about Michael setting to find Zuckerman and righting the wrongs they caused in trying the right the wrongs of history.

I borrowed Making History because I was in need of a good laugh. I suppose the book had its amusing moments but I wasn’t keeling over with an attack of the funnies. As a rule, Fry is a fairly verbose writer. But, Making History beats all his other books hands down in the realm of the bombastic. Frequently, I found myself thinking “yeah, yeah, I get the point, move on already (sotto Yiddish voice).” This was my fourth Stephen Fry novel. I think there’s a bit of fatigue value with Fry’s writing; jokes become stale and plots become predictable. I think I’ll avoid Fry for a while and attempt him only after a long, dry spell of non-fiction.