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I finished this last night, and enjoyed it: a sweet, richly-finished but ultimately rather lightweight story. It's touching and unusual that the grand irony underlying The Forty-Niners is simply that we know Steve and Wulf will stay together for over fifty years.
A few points I was less happy with, or questioned:
-- a real shame Moore couldn't check his German. He's so careful with language and yet you have "ungluchlich" for "unglucklich", "Leibe" for "Liebe" and Wulf unconvincingly using the formal "verstehen Sie" to Steve. My own German is rusty but a lot of the expressions seemed directly translated from English, rather than natural phrases.
-- I know this is an alternate-past of course, and I can see why Moore has used the word, but I don't think anyone would use "queer" proudly in 1949. A man happy with his sexual attraction to men, as I understand it, might have used "homophile". To call yourself "queer" would, I think, have been like saying "I'm scum".
-- The time-machine plot was very unsatisfying. This isn't just a big ray-gun, it's a time-machine! something unspeakable, unheard-of, surely the most incredible and terrifying invention anyone would have seen even in the alt-20th century, an opportunity for man to play God, more awful and potent than an atom bomb. But it's dealt with in a few farcical pages, with the technology and the potential for another identical or superior machine never mentioned. There's more fuss over the idea of an advanced robot. The huge close-up newspaper, quite obviously misrepresenting the course of history, looks like a Mad magazine fold-in.
-- I'd thought in chapter 1 that the vampires were an analogue for Jews. "If Hitler did one good thing," says our reformed Nazi, hater of Fascism, "it was sending them to the camps." The little vampire's language struck me, perhaps wrongly, as representing Jewish dialect: "See, my family? How they put on the big welcome?" I don't know... isn't there something uncomfortable about the idea that the bad guys are people Hitler was justified in trying to wipe out through death-camps? I'm sure this isn't an intentional analogue on Moore's part, but I wondered if anyone else shared my reading. |
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