Forum:Two Fronts for those who have read it

At the Judge's suggestion:

I finished it up yesterday. For me, I think the book probably benefitted from lowered expectations, rather like W&E. I was expecting "bad", and got "surprisingly entertaining." It isn't great, and many of the same problems still persist, but there are several strengths.

First, things seem to be happening much more quickly at the macro level. It begins in the closing weeks of 1941, and ends in the Spring of 1943. We seem to be in the spring to the finish.

Second, there are subtle but clear changes taking place. The big one is that the U.S. declares the a-bomb project a boondoggle and stops it. Japan, on the other hand, manages to release anthrax and the plague on Hawaii. The Nazis are facing an increasingly unhappy German population. Leftism seems to be more relevant in Western Europe than it was in OTL. In the UK, Cartland suggests Labour might not be so bad. By itself, that's not such a big deal, given OTL, but then we learn that Léon Blum has regained political momentum in France, and of course, the Republicans still have a large chunk of Spain. On the other hand, the Soviet characters seem to have no faith in Stalin, and with the way things are going in the Pacific, it's quite plausible to think the GOP will get back into power come 1944. Ironically, these subtle changes have kind of left me wanting a Cold War series follow up.

Third, HT doesn't seem to be relying much on parallelism. I could be wrong, as I'm not a WWI scholar (and that seems to be the obvious model here), but there have been no Stalingrads, no Overlords, no Bulges, etc so common to HT's other WWII work.

Fourth, while there is a fair amount of wheel-spinning with several characters, I find that I like enough of them at this point that I was ok with mostly. Even Lemp had interesting moments.

The weaknesses we've discussed about as often as soldiers in the Second Great War discussed tobacco, but I'll do it again: HT's preference for common man/women characters as his POVs has done this series no favors, especially in combination with his preference for a set number of third person limited POVs. In the past, he's included some characters who at least had entry into the halls of government or into the upper echelons of the military.

There isn't a single character like that in this series. No Molotovs, no Atvars, no Flora Blackfords. In the first half of the series, that wasn't necessarily a problem, given the nature of the POD. And even now, its not a universal problem. The U.S., the USSR, Japan, the minor Axis powers are all more or less identical to OTL, so we can easily intuit their goals and decision making processes. But the Spanish Republic is still a going concern in 1943. So is the government of Daladier in France. While Germany is still run by the Nazis, Hitler's position sure seems more precarious than in OTL, and there have been a couple of dramatic coup attempts that we know little about. Most egregious (IMHO), Britain has been run by the military since 1941 (so roughly two years), and we know absolutely nothing about that government's inner workings. HT's use of everyman characters, who by definition aren't in the know, means the reader isn't in the know, and that's just frustrating.

And it would be so easy to fix. For example: while Peggy usually does somewhat interest things, in this volume, there were a couple of scenes where she literally took Herb to the train station then went home and listened to the radio. A couple of those could easily have been Ronald Cartland doing some government business or other, or some mid-level bureaucrat in Madrid or Berlin. And Peggy wouldn't have to die. HT would just need to loosen up these imposed POV limits.

So, in summation--I liked it better than CdE, primarily because I wasn't so thoroughly disappointed as I was in CdE. It's not the best volume of the series (that's still TBS), but it's better than the worst (HW). It stoked my interest in volume 6, but I'll be glad when this series ends, and I hope HT will put WWII aside for a while. Maybe series writing in general. TR (talk) 15:41, August 1, 2013 (UTC)