For the next year, I’ll be taking part in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read, joining one hundred other bloggers as we read and review 52 books in one year.

Today I’ll be reviewing my first book: Stephen Fry’s novel, “Making History.”

There’s a certain romance to “what if.” At night, when I can’t sleep, I have a box of regrets I like to paw through. What would have changed, I wonder, if I had done x instead of y, chosen this college over that, if my parents had bought a house one town over instead of my childhood home? Would I be a better person now, smarter, thinner, better with money, less prone to late-night ruminations?

Physics offers some comfort: String theory suggests that for every decision we make, each moment when potential paths diverge, an alternate universe is created. Years ago, in some alternate history, the man who was to become my grandfather boarded a ship to Hong Kong instead of going home to his new bride, and was lost along with the rest of its crew. In some other universe, he stayed behind, but moved his family west instead of heading home to North Carolina. My mother grew up in San Francisco, never chose a college in St. Louis, never met a bearded junior who reminded her Little Women’s Dr Bhaer, and I was never born. In some other history, I was born, but did everything differently. I live in Kansas, with kids and a yard and some job involving lots of math. In yet another universe, JFK actually was a jelly donut.

In Making History, actor/novelist Stephen Fry tackles the 20th Century’s most haunting what if: how would the world be changed if Hitler never rose to power? Would Europe have marched quietly past the twentieth century’s halfway mark, innocent of one less genocide? Or was there an inevitability to Hitler’s rise that transcended even the man himself? Could you have Hitler without Hitler?

The novel follows Michael “Pup” Young, a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge who has chosen history, not because its his passion, but because it is his “field of least incompetence.” If only he’d been endowed with more patience, more discipline, he’d have chosen literature. But, he notes,

While I can read Middlemarch or The Dunciad or, I don’t know, Julian Barnes or Jay McInerney say, as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students possess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of Animal Farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at nothing more than the simple progression of sounds. But when it came to writing that thing called an essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start. How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?

But this inability or unwillingness to look beyond literature’s emotionally resonant qualities only shows Pup’s blindness: everything makes him spin and wobble, from his tumultuous relationship with his physicist girlfriend, Jane, to the history that he can’t resist dressing up with  prose-y historical fictions scattered throughout his Ph.D. Thesis. And so, when given the opportunity to tweak history itself, he doesn’t pause for analysis, but instead goes spinning off into an ill-thought-out adventure in historical revisionism.

Ultimately, what saves Pup are the lessons to be had in following his what ifs to their unforseeable conclusions. There is no perfection to be found, no event that, avoided, can save the world from itself. But in embracing his own present, in finding the self that fortune cannot alter, Pup ultimately gains the best outcome we can hope, for both the world and ourselves: he grows up. And in doing so, he comes to terms with history.

Edit: I just realized that, though I finished the book this morning, I started it yesterday, before the official start of Cannonball Read. Oh well. Consider this a practice run.