1952. It is more than a decade since the Dunkirk fiasco marked the end of Britain's war and an uneasy peace with Hitler. In Africa, the swastika flies from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. Gleaming autobahns bisect the jungle and jet fighters patrol the skies. Britain and the Nazis have divided the continent but now the demonic plans of Walter Hochburg - architect of Nazi Africa - threaten Britain's ailing colonies.
In England, ex-mercenary Burton Cole is offered one last contract. Burton grabs the chance to settle an old score with Hochburg, despite his own misgivings and the protests of the woman he loves. If Burton fails, unimaginable horrors will be unleashed in Africa. No one - black or white - will be spared. But when his mission turns to disaster, Burton is forced to flee for his life. His flight takes him from the unholy killing ground of Kongo to SS slave camps and on to war-torn Angola, finally reaching its thrilling climax in a conspiracy that leads to the dark heart of the Reich itself.
Guy Saville has combined meticulous research with edge-of-the seat suspense to produce a superb novel of alternate history. The Afrika Reich
Read & Download The Afrika Reich
Full Review on my blog :- http://www.milorambles.com/2011/02/18...
I’ve always had a fascination for history, an interest my father instilled in me as a kid growing up, at a time when the only history taught in my school was that of the Norman’s and Saxons – I was more of a Great War and Second World War reader – I had no time for the Saxons and my exam results clearly showed that! I would have bitten someone’s hand off to read a book on the Anzacs or the history of The Battle of the Somme – alas we were stuck with Norman Conquest of 1066!
When Hodder & Stoughton sent me a copy of Guy Seville’s debut novel “Afrika Reich” I was immediately struck by a cover design that was so tactile with its velvet like touch it begged to be read! Utilising a dark granite black for its primary colour, the front cover has two vibrant and distinctive red “SS” letters atop of a palm tree and skull.
Set in 1952 in an alternative universe, Hitler has proven too strong for Britain, the European Jews have been deported to Madagascar and a reluctant peace agreement between Germany and Britain has been signed. Despite Japan’s attack on the United States in December 1941, Congress voted to remain neutral in Europe and Asia due to the weakened economy at home. The events all add up to paint a picture of German superiority and dominance.
“1952. It is more than a decade since the Dunkirk fiasco marked the end of Britain's war and an uneasy peace with Hitler.
In Africa, the swastika flies from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. Gleaming autobahns bisect the jungle and jet fighters patrol the skies. Britain and the Nazis have divided the continent but now the demonic plans of Walter Hochburg - architect of Nazi Africa - threaten Britain's ailing colonies.
In England, ex-mercenary Burton Cole is offered one last contract. Burton grabs the chance to settle an old score with Hochburg, despite his own misgivings and the protests of the woman he loves. If Burton fails, unimaginable horrors will be unleashed in Africa. No one - black or white - will be spared.
But when his mission turns to disaster, Burton is forced to flee for his life.
His flight takes him from the unholy killing ground of Kongo to SS slave camps and on to war-torn Angola, finally reaching its thrilling climax in a conspiracy that leads to the dark heart of the Reich itself.”
“Afrika Reich” is a graphic novel with its fair share of violence leaving nothing to the imagination. The deaths are horrific and all the while I felt a great deal of animosity towards the German soldiers who appeared to take great satisfaction in brutalising their captives – it truly was a feeling I found hard to shake throughout.
The language, along with the murders, is colourful but is always within keeping of a book of this genre – I never felt Guy Saville overstepped the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable – the balance was just about right. Words such as “Niggers”, “Negros” – both shunned in today’s society for the most part – add a certain credibility to the narrative not to mention augment the feeling of realism when dealing with the sensitive issues of racial cleansing. 448 Another book that surprised me. I did not actually expect to like this book. In fact, all I had to go off of was the back cover. I do not like to really read reviews of others before I have read a book as I don't like to be have preconceived thoughts about a book until I have made up my own. So thus the reason that I picked up this book many times and put it back down. I kind of wondered what I was thinking back than that made me want to read this book. I finally gave in to picking up this book to read. I really enjoyed Mr. Saville's take on the Nazi's and the what if regarding the continent of Africa.
Plus Burton turned out to be a really likable guy. He was someone that you could stand behind and see as the hero. The battle scenes between Burton and Hochburg were thrilling, especially the last one. There was so much action to keep me intrigued and happy. Yes, I agree with other readers that the scenes at times seemed way over the top in regards to Burton seemed like he had nine lives and had lots of luck on his side to escape every time but still sometimes over the top is a good thing. 448 The Afrika Reich was something of an interesting experience all things considered. I picked it up because I'm a huge fan of World War II history and, though it would pain my history professor to hear it, I enjoy a good alternate history story that stems from a What if Germany won or did this scenario.
Overall, Saville did a bang up job creating an alternate history world for The Third Reich. While it assumes a few political changes in World War II and that Germany had nearly unlimited resources, the way Afrika ended up being carved up and left for the SS to destroy was interesting and, in a way, believable.
The rest of the book ended up being something of a predictable affair though. Like an action movie in book form, the characters absorbed ridiculous amounts of punishment, escaped the impossible, killed dozens of Nazis, and sacrificed themselves or won the day accordingly. None of that bothers me, but it does drop the enjoyment down just a tad. It did, however, help a book that was slow to start to kick into gear and deliver a faced past and entertaining read.
On the downside, the book committed the crime of ending on a cliff hanger after revealing a major plot twist (one I didn't actually expect) at the very last minute. I'm all for reading series, but considering the time that can typically come between book releases (and the fact that I had no idea this was meant for a series), I hate being just dumped at the end without a single bit of closure.
In the end, The Afrika Reich was a fun, enjoyable read that introduced me to a world I'd like to see fleshed out with further books. I just wish it wasn't so cruel at the end. 448 Guy Saville's The Afrika Reich was one of the books I simply had to have. First off, I am a fan of alternative history, and second, a book based on a different ending to WW2 must be interesting.
There's of course Robert Harris' masterpiece, Fatherland, but there have been less books based on this premise than one would expect. Maybe because the topic is so well known that a book based on such a premise would have to be exceptionally well written to pull off the stunt.
I am happy to report, Guy Saville does indeed pull it off.
The first criterion of any Alternative History book is the setting. It must be solid, believable, and sufficiently different to the status quo. Saville excels in all three. He never explains his world, where Hitler has entered an uneasy peace with Britain and conquered much of Africa - everything is taken at face value and we readers merely acknowledge what has happened.
Saville's Africa, then, is a beautifully crafted Nazi wonderland, a steamy jungle run by Walter Hochburg. This man is the epitome of Naziness, ruthless, all-powerful in his dominion, and driven. His grand plans for Africa can indeed be traced back to the Kolonialpolitisches Amt. Had Germany managed to make peace with Britain, KpA's significance might have been just what Saville shows us. And its plans would have quite plausibly been those of Hochburg's.
The protagonists, Burton Cole and Patrick Whaler, then, lead us through Dunkirk and the truce to a descent into hell - to kill Hochburg. Saville really shines in his handling of the assassination and the subsequent escape across Africa, finally into Loanda. Double and triple crossings have the reader at the edge of his seat - can one trust anyone on the entire continent? Still, Saville never digs into Indiana Jones' locker. Cole and Whaler hit hard, but they are hit hard as well.
Saville's forte is how he manages to add steam to the action page by page. There was a high point in the action, about two thirds of the book, when I thought this must be the pinnacle of the entire book, and that to take the adventure higher would risk becoming a farce of itself. But I was pleasantly surprised - contrary to what often happens, namely that the reader loses the suspension of disbelief, Saville brings us ever further, closer to the coast, and closer to the edge of our seats.
The ending is perfect, since we already know Saville is working on Part 2 of this eventual trilogy. I am expecting Vol. 2 with just as much enthusiasm as I did Vol. 1.
No book is without its flaws, but I can only report one thing I didn't like. I am aware that it is part of this genre to use short sentences, two, three words, in a machine-gun fashion. This is all well in books of lesser value, where the staccato rhythm is used to generate action. Saville. however, is a superb action writer and has absolutely no need for sentences without a subject, and could well tie the tat-tat-tat sentences into longer ones. It would not take anything away from the effect, but would add to the reading enjoyment.
Five stars not given out of kindness of heart, but out of amazement. A great book indeed. 448 I listened to this audiobook and got a quarter of the way in but feel very liberated to have given up on it. I do worry a bit though that I just don't get the genre... do suspense/thriller books always have completely wooden dialogue in them? They don't have to, do they? I really cringed when the Nazi captures one of the Brits and literally exclaims Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman! That's really when I gave up. But it's kind of a shame, since I love the idea of the imagined setting of Nazi-controlled 1952 Africa. I kept on looking back at the map and I loved the revisionist historical detail he'd invented. I wish there'd been more of that and less of everything else. 448
The blurp puts it in line of SS-GB and Fatherland ; is it a successor?
More like that unpromising younger son who luckily is barred by primogeniture.
Strong Setting, Weak Story.
Unfortunately, the search for a new balance of power through Africa spirals out of control into a series of Hollywood action scenes involving the Portugese resistance. The descriptions get really choppy here.
Saville employs a pair of ex-Legionnaires for heroes but otherwise luckily takes the high road with the story, rather than the high castle. We follow the big events which aspire to redirect the alternate universe.
Our team of Dunkirk survivors (and those too young to have witnessed the carnage but old enough to hunger for the glory) serves to remind us of how close-run the evacuation really was; any pluck was cultivated upon hindsight. The first step towards Axis victory was the destruction of the British Army upon the red beaches of France, coupled with the real-life collapse of British Asia. This would've left the armed forces around the Suez Canal sufficiently depleted to reverse El Alamein. Add to this an isolationist America & what would Britain have left to stand alone with? Crucially, victory over the Soviet Union isn't touched upon much. One Enemy at a time seemed to have won the war.
As for the Germanized Africa, the map is spot-on : enlarged Italian colonies (reversing the British victory in Somalia), preserved colonies for the Iberian neutrals, switched colonies from the vanquished (France, Belgium) and a 'generous' leftover of British colonies once Halifax took over from Churchill. Documents on plans for new German colonisation of the dark continent are scarce, but the reverse-engineering sells it. The presence of Herero heroïnes injects an uneasy note of realism into the repressed fury of the natives.
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism by David Olusoga 448 Me gustó mucho, tenía un poco de miedo por mis altas expectativas pero lo disfruté bastante. Una interesantisima ucronia. 448 -A medio camino entre ningún sitio y ningún lugar.-
Género. Novela.
Lo que nos cuenta. El antiguo mercenario Burton Cole recibe la visita de un supuesto representante de intereses privados que desea contratarle para eliminar a una persona en África. A pesar de su negativa, cuando descubre que la identidad de la persona es Walter E. Hochburg, figura negra en la vida de Burton y supuestamente muerto aunque actualmente gobernador general del Congo ocupado por los alemanes, la sorprendente información hace que acepte de inmediato. Pero las cosas no son exactamente lo que parecen.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/... 448 This is a really excellent thriller based on the premise that the Germans won World War II and then controlled most of Africa. The book is set in 1952 and has an English ex-soldier sent to Africa to kill a high ranking German officer.
Then basically all hell breaks loose for over 400 pages of riveting, non-stop action, with many people dying and lots of explosions. As the blurb on the book says Fatherland for an action movie age.
While this book is obviously fiction, there are elements of historical truth as Hitler really did have grand plans for Africa, which he no doubt would have carried out if they had won the war.
So all in all, an excellent high octane thriller, which should be enjoyed by readers who like this sort of thing, as I do. 448 Dominion by C J Sansom
Mantle Hardback Oct 2012
ISBN : 978-0-230-74416-5
+
The Afrika Reich - Guy Saville
Hodder (paperback) 2011
ISBN: 978-1-444-71066-3
I must state in advance here that I too have just written a counter factual novel that will come out in March 2013 so my interest in these two books is professional.
Both these novels make the presumption that appeasement triumphed after the disaster of Dunkirk 1940 and both books, rather oddly, are set in 1952, living in a world completely dominated by a ruthless oppressive Third Reich. Both accept that Viscount Halifax rather than Churchill took over to negotiate the ‘peace’ and in both cases England was allowed to keep the ‘Empire’ but faced increasing tariffs in trading with Europe. Both follow the arc of Robert Harris’s 'Fatherland' in accepting that the fate of the Jews was never discovered (although there are different final solutions posited here).
The conceit of alt history is that anything can happen if you divert from history in one small way (turn on a sixpence as C. J Sansom remarks) and everything follows from that.
I wanted to see how both writers treated the trajectory of history following the acceptance of ‘peace’ rather than war in 1940. How readily Britain accepts fascism and how firm any resistance would be. Dominion is a story about resistance; The Afrika Reich is more boys own story set against some unimaginable violence again Africans. Both writers then are following the logic of Hitler’s victory and both assume that subjugation of the Russians would always be a ‘problem’.
In The Afrika Reich cruelty builds a vast autobahn from neutral South Africa’s border to the German Congo so that the rich mineral resources can be extracted using slave labour.
The UK in C J Samsom’s novel is still decrepit, run down, depressing, utterly willing to be subject to Oswald Mosley as Home Secretary. The police and army are infected by fascism and modern London of 1952 is stricken by a lethal fog (borrowed from real life and a real killer). It reads like an episode of Foyle’s War but very slowly with many little backstory flashbacks that could have been left on the cutting floor.
The Afrika Reich is strictly a boy’s own adventure. Guns, impossible odds, hired assassins fly in to the German Congo to assassinate the Governor General – a psychotic racist who has literally paved the new city square with African skulls.
The assassination seems to be successful and against all odds (despite being betrayed) they fight their way out of the situation and Burton the hero, with Philip, the tough neutral American, head towards Angola where the Germans are planning a simultaneous invasion and Rhodesia. One doesn’t really have a feel for the Africa - the place but as a rip roaring Dogs Of War tale with tough guys overcoming all odds against despicable enemies it’s a bloody fast read and has more pace than even a Bourne movie. Credible? Not really, but you don’t really care because it is a lot of fun and there are some interesting characters (notably the teen Angolan terrorist who wants to blow up a new tunnel to prevent the Germans invading Luanda.)
C J Sansom takes a different more sober tack. His writing style is very period. As if he has watched 'Brief Encounter' just once too often. I realised he is going for authentic 1952 dialogue, but it is often so formal, the exposition so over explained, it grates. The pace suffers terribly in the first half. The story concerns an unambitious civil servant called David who used to flat share with Frank (now a researcher on meteorites) who has been locked up in a mental institution for attempting to kill his brother (visiting from America) and shouting ‘It’s the end of the world’. It is not giving anything away that the topic here is atomic and the whole thrust of the novel is ‘we mustn’t let the Germans have the information’.
Dominion is full of arch stock characters, whether villains or resistance. It’s depressing and weirdly the most interesting character is the SS German Jew hunter – sent over to the London to ‘interview’ the mad scientist. He is cold, calculating, cynical and ruthless. So many other players feel like they have drifted in from an Agatha Christie play and are standing around waiting for a bit of dialogue. David aggrieved wife Sarah gets far too much airtime and one longs for something to happen. A central plank of the story takes place in the great fog of ’52 when 12,000 people died of respitory illness and these sequences are well written, authentic and gripping.
Both novels are curios. 1952 is so long ago and it is hard to understand some attitudes or the complacency and acceptance, but the ‘what if’ element keeps you reading. We move on, tempered by our times and attitudes and sometimes (well pretty much all the way through) the racism of all the characters intended or unconscious jars. In these novels women’s liberation would have been still born. Both enable the reader to conclude we had a lucky escape that it was Churchill that followed the ineffectual Chamberlain and not Halifax. We would not have liked this fascist world or the logic of their obsessions.
What category are you? How pure is your blood? What do you know about your great grandfather? And how could you live in a world where such things matter?
If I had to choose then The Afrika Reich is a faster read but both will leave a nasty taste in your mouth for a reality that nearly happened. 448
