Making History Entertaining... But Not As Entertaining As It Could Be (Making History)

I love Stephen Fry. His "quintessential English" persona always confirms for me what I enjoy about living in the UK. His talents (acting, writing, presenting) are endless and his intelligence is astounding.

But enough from the Stephen Fry fan club...

Making History is his third novel. Written in 1997, it won the Sideways Award for Alternate History and received critical acclaim. After reading and enjoying his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, I decided I needed to discover Fry's fictional writing abilities.

The novel is written in the first person of Michael "Pup" Young. He is a young history student at Cambridge on the verge of finishing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler. Michael's life is that of fairly normal academic (he lives with his girlfriend Jane, wakes up with hangovers after college parties, etc.) until he meets Professor Leo Zuckerman who takes an interest in his thesis and takes Michael, quite literally, to another world.

This is an extremely enigmatic, fast-paced piece work of science fiction. Yet it contains so much information, theory and detail that there is barely time to take in what is happening and truly enjoy the story. It is almost as if you can see Fry's genius thought process on the pages--he's come up with this brilliant central idea and now he needs to get it down onto paper as fast as he can.

I was quite taken by this book and its characters and themes, but I don't think Fry did his ideas and pace justice. It was so action-packed and wonderfully dynamic that, dare I say it, I think it would've been better suited to television or film. In fact, some parts of the novel are written in script format and this does genuinely help the action move along and flow more readily.

But I suppose it is quite obvious Fry can write for television and film (Fry and Laurie, Bright Young Things) so I guess he deserves praise for writing in the purer form. Still, I would be genuinely pleased to see this story in the form of a mini-series or similar on our television screens.