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New Statesman & Society, Yael Lotan, 17 July 1992:
Suppose you have just come back from spending three years in the Kalahari desert, living with the Bushmen, without a radio or other contact with the outside world. You land at Gatwick and pick up the papers and blam! you know you've slipped into an alternative history. Something happened while you were away. This simply isn't the timetrack you were on in 1989.
Having eliminated the possibility that it's a dream or an elaborate leg-pull, you start tearing out your hair. What is all this? Sarajevo? St Petersburg, for crissake? American millionaires taking pleasure jaunts in MIG 29s? Nelson Mandela, speaking from his official residence, declines to meet with President de Klerk to discuss constitutional reform? A Texan midget is running on his own to the White House and will probably get in? Germans regret unification? The Sunday Times is about to publish Goebbels' diaries? ...
The way we look at "alternative history" novels-usually found in libraries' SF section-is to question their plausibility, which simply means comparing them with what "really" happened. But is reality plausible? Only because it's what we've got.
Simon Louvish plays some neat tricks in his latest novel. It turns out that Germany became a Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1930s, causing the leaders of the Nazi party to flee to the US. The second world war didn't happen, and in 1968 Britain and France are still putting down the restless natives in the colonies. Fascist Italy, under the senile Duce, is fighting in Abyssinia, where Ernesto "Che" Guevara is leading the rebellion. The President of the US is old Joseph Kennedy, who is grooming his sons to follow him, while the American Nazi party, led by Joseph Gable - aka Goebbels - is promoting US-born Rudolph Hitler, son of Adolf, for the race to the White House. Trotsky is alive - in the Kremlin. The California coast is a radioactive waste, following a Japanese nuclear strike. In April 1968, Mr Hermann Goering died peacefully in Chicago, aged 74, after a long career in the "American party", which had put Papa Hitler in the US Senate.
But plus ca change - it’s still the same chessboard. The central psychosis of our time, nationalism, dominates this time-track too. A Polish colonel by the name of Chmielnicki takes Gable/Goebbels to a fascist camp in the Silesian townlet Oswiecim (German name: Auschwitz), whence he can look over the frontier at his beloved Fatherland, dominated by the Red Beast. A short-lived revolution in Italy is crushed by the same forces we associate with the name Guernica.
This is a hallucinatory experience. Louvish has put in a tremendous amount of research and the "real" and "imaginary" are so skilfully interwoven as to make the emerging world-picture no less convincing than whatwe believe happened since the early 1930s. There was no more reason for the National Socialist party to come to power in Germany in 1933 than there was for the USSR to collapse in a messy heap in 1991. The causes of both surprising events are endlessly analysed post-factum, but that does not make them plausible in the sense that Macbeth's destruction or Ulysses' victory over his wife's suitors are plausible.
Without the second world war and the genocide of the Jews, Louvish's little Zionist community in Palestine is still struggling for political independence, parallel with the Arab anti-colonial movement Where this leaves the author, who in another time-track grew up in Israel, I cannot figure out.The Sunday Times, 14 June 1992, paperbacks:
Louvish plays the game of recreating a possible history in which Germany is taken over by communists who force Hitler to flee to America. Here he is prominent in a white supremacist movement and becomes a senator. His son is a front-runner in the presidential elections. Mussolini rules Italy well into the 1960’s and Poland is a strong and influential force in international politics. These, and many other wry twists of 20th century history (including the distinguished career of prime-minister Mosley) are set down with an admirable consistency. The world which is posited is both oddly familiar and totally distorted. The problems of the world, however, remain interestingly familiar.Literary Review, July 1992, by Mike Petty:
I am, strictly speaking, disqualified from reviewing this because I was once its publisher. But I would be failing in my duty to Literary Review readers, particularly those who would relish an ingenious, inventive and satisfying speculative fantasy on an alternative twentieth century, if I did not bring it to their attention. So I will simply say that if you have ever wondered what might have happened had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht come out on top in 1919, allying Germany to Russia and exiling Hitler and Co to the USA (no World War II!) then Louvish is your man.From the Jewish Chronicle, July 31 1992, by Vanessa Feltz (!!!)
Louvish’s is the ultimate “what if…” book. The year is 1968. Senator Adolph Hitler of Illinois is backing his son Rudi for President under the “Keep America White and Aryan” banner. Goebbels, now a U.S. citizen, Joseph Gabel, waits for his slice of power. After 44 years at the helm of the USSR, Leon Trotsky has just died in Moscow.
Louvish asks: “History… the sorry progress of homo sap, could it have done a better job of it, or is it all just horse manure?” The same question might be asked of this book. My answer is that, despite the hellishly confusing bobbing and weaving, Louvish has grappled with a conceit worthy of John Donne and emerged triumphant.
I’m the first to admit I wasn’t the most ardent Blok fan. But Louvish won me over with this book. His descriptions of this sceptred isle as “sunk deeper than ever before in its fish-faced malaise,” and Sarah as “no Greta Garbo, being more like a human dumpling, cuddly and willing to be devoured,” are typically deft.”
(Hmmm. Ed.)
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