Settling Accounts: The Grapple [Paperback]

"The Grapple" is the penultimate volume in Turtledove's Alternative History series, which began with the rebels winning the American civil war in the prelude to "How Few Remain" and has continued through an alternative World War One and now an alternative World War Two.

One or two of the books in this series were below Turtledove's usual high standard, but the "Settling Accounts" part of the series has been excellent, and as soon as I started reading this book I had great difficulty putting it down to go to work, eat, put children to bed etc.

It's a moot point whether this story, like many of Turtledove's recent works, should be described as alternative history, or as real history with different countries and people doing pretty much the same things. In this case, the narrative has been extremely similar to that of the real World War II, with the role of Nazi Germany played by a fascist-led, Confederate States of America and the "Final Solution" directed against African Americans rather than Jews.

After the CSA lost the battle for Pittsburg (e.g. Stalingrad) at the end of the previous book (Drive to the East) the war appeared to be taking much the same course as in real history, but Turtledove keeps you guessing about whether the final outcome will be the same, particularly because both the USA and CSA are desperately trying to develop the atomic bomb as soon as possible. (On the other side of the Atlantic he hints that Britain and Germany are in a similar race.)

It's extraordinary how many times Turtledove has managed to tell essentially the same stories from history with slight variations and still make them interesting. Part of the reason for this is that he is really good at making real and believable characters, and I often find myself caring about what happens to the individual viewpoint characters in the books in this series even when I despise the causes which they are fighting for and some of their actions.

Which happens quite a lot of the time, because one of the minor problems with the series is there isn't really a cause that the reader can fully identify with. None of the nations in the book can really claim to be the good guys, there are only bad causes and worse ones.

One interesting difference between this series and a previous, brilliant book by Harry Turtledove in which the CSA successfully seceded - "The Guns of the South" - is that in that book both the USA and CSA appeared likely to develop into civilised, decent societies. In this series the hatred between the United States and the Confederate States has poisoned everything in both countries and their relationships with the rest of the world.

For example, while there isn't much about the occupation of Canada in "The Grapple" (the main characters from the Canadian story are dead or serving elsewhere) the USA is still trying to hold Canada under a deeply resented military occupation which has gone on for 20 years. In this series both USA and CSA are guilty of terrible atrocities against each other, their own citizens, and others. There are also decent people of all races and nations in the book, and it is them, rather than the dreadful nations they are fighting for or living under, who the reader can identify with.

Overall this was a really fascinating book. The following book "In at the death" finishes the story of the alternative World War 2 and is probably the last in the series - though with Harry Turtledove you never quite know and he might decide to set another book a generation or so later. If so it will probably read like a greatly extended version of his short story "Must and Shall."

For reference the full series is

1) HOW FEW REMAIN (the story of the second war between the USA and CSA)

2) GREAT WAR trilogy (World War 1 with the USA allied to Germany)
American Front
Walk in Hell
Breakthroughs

3) AMERICAN EMPIRE trilogy (between the wars after the US/German victory)
Blood and Iron
The Centre Cannot Hold
The Victorious Opposition

4) SETTLING ACCOUNTS: World War 2, but even worse
Return Engagement
Drive to the East
The Grapple
In at the Death

Harry Turtledove is not a great writer. His style (such as it is) is plodding, his characterisation is generally flat and his prose is banal and repetitive. This is excusable to some extent as most conversations between everyday people are banal and repetitive, and as most of Mr. Turtledove's cast of characters are everyday people, this is inevitable. However, I sometimes get to the point of feeling that, if Mr. Turtledove were in the room as I read for the ten millionth time that someone was not wrong, or that Confederate cigarettes were so much better than US cigarettes, I'd have difficulty restraining myself from hitting him over the head with his word processing keyboard.

Mr. Turtledove's clever technique of overcoming his shortcomings as a writer is to tell not one story but lots of them, from the points of view of a large palette of different characters on both sides of the conflict. It seems also to be the perfect recipe for writing long books (804 pages this one). Because of this large number of characters, Mr. Turtledove can kill off a few major ones every now and then without it having much effect on the tale as a whole. I find it a refreshing change from those books where the hero(ine) is apparently endowed with immortality.

So, given these deficiencies, what has kept me going through this series to this, the ninth book? Mr. Turtledove's ingenious concept of rewriting the history of the world wars and the rise of Nazism as a continuation of the American Civil War/War for Southern Independence, that's what. As an amateur student of history, I was interested to see how many parallels Mr. Turtledove could wring out of it, and how far he could push them. From the first book in the Great War series, he was clearly determined to wring out every possible parallel. It was clear from book one that he had his Hitler in the wings, embittered, black-hating, Confederate artillery NCO Jake Featherston. From that, it was logical that there would eventually be a Final Solution to the African-American Problem. And the parallels continue - as Confederate President, Featherston even launches the assault on the USA at the end on book 6 with the codeword "Blackbeard" (the German codename for the attack on the Soviet Union was "Barbarossa" (red beard)). So, I wondered, will there be equivalents of Pearl Harbor, the Warsaw Ghetto, Stalingrad, Kursk, D-Day, the von Stauffenberg assassination attempt, Eva Braun and the Götterdammerung in the ruins of Berlin, Hiroshima? Not telling, read it for yourself and see...

In some ways, Mr. Turtledove's parallels do not ring true. In this book, the Confederates often have superior weapons technology (such as tanks and automatic weapons), as had the Germans (until the Russian T-34 gave them the shock of their lives). But Germany had a long history of scientific and engineering excellence (giving it a superiority in many areas that it never lost, for example, automatic weapons). On the other hand, the Confederacy that lost the (real) Civil War was relatively poor in a technological sense and held on for so long largely as a result of superior commanders, tremendous courage and the incentive of a nation fighting for its life. It's hard to see that that would have materially changed. One wonders also whether Featherstone's equivalent of the Waffen SS would fight and die so fanatically. However, if there's one lesson that should have been learned from the past, it is that the Germans didn't produce the monstrosity of Nazism because they were uniquely evil, it arose as the result of a series of historical circumstances, which, if duplicated elsewhere, would produce pretty much the same result. Mr. Turtledove does us a great service by reminding us of this. We have seen only recently how easy it is for a proudly democratic society to slip into blatantly undemocratic principles, distorted propaganda, unjustified invasion, torture and murder.

For me, the biggest surprise of all was that it hasn't finished yet. Mr. Turtledove has so far produced the books in threes - three for the Great War, three for the interim period and the rise of Jake Featherston. However, there will clearly be a fourth to finish it all off (so to speak). Given that we all know (more or less) how it will all end, will it be worth buying? Possibly not, but I know I will...

I have read nearly every book by Turtledove because I love this time of science fiction - the alternative history genre. This latest offering by HT is a great improvement on the previous ones in the series. Perhaps he is reading some of his reviews? I have to admit I have been disappointed with a lot of the previous ones and find myself reading them partly in the hope they will improve and to see what happens to the characters.

In the Grapple, the pace has really quicked and there is a lot going on as the war turns against Jake Featherston. Some characters which havent been going anywhere in a long time have finally been killed off.

The dialouge has made some improvements, some still say Turtledoves favourite phrase; "Tell me I'm wrong?" but its very rare now rather than in every chapter. The battle scenes have become more realistic and take up more of the book. Still not quite pinned down really, which is odd in a series of novels about an alternative World War Two action/battles/fights dont seem to have been a priority, instead its been dialouge and or politics. But that has changed now.

I was hoping that the war/series would be concluded with this novel but the war goes on. I always assume the author will try and "fix" things, that his alternative world becomes like ours, a united USA, an independent Canada, etc. but this seems less and less likely.

Read this but also try Birminghams Axis of Time novels and the brilliant S M Stirling's Dies the Fire or the Peshawar Lancers.