Thursday 13 September 2012

Bibliophilia: The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove

The Man with the Iron Heart – Harry Turtledove

I’ve heard about his stuff for years, his alternate history, and decided to try a one off story, rather than one that was part of a larger series. And I really didn’t dig it. The premise is based on a fact – at the end of WW2, there was a half hearted attempt by the Nazis to organize a guerrilla resistance to the Allied occupation. It never really came to much. Despite the fact that there were still die-hard holdouts, by and large, the Germans had been well and truly crushed. The story here is that Heydrich wasn’t assassinated in Czechoslovakia in 1942, and ended up being the leader of this movement, the Werewolves as they were called.

I think my big problem with it was that it tried way too hard to transpose events of today, ie Iraq, to the situation in post WW2 Germany. It came off as hollow and contrived to me. That and I had trouble buying into the idea that people back on the homefront in the USA organized to oppose the continued occupation in Germany. I know, alternate history, it requires a suspension of disbelief, but it just didn’t feel believable to me.

I finished it, and I will give some of his other stuff a shot one day, but this one I didn’t find that satisfying.

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