Double Booked

The Spanish Civil War was both a preview and a concentrated form of a clash between two of the vilest ideologies ever invented by fallen humanity -- fascism, as the catspaw of its most extreme version called National Socialism and the Stalinist strain of the poison of Communism and Marxism. In the late 1930s, devotees of both dueled in Spain, allowing the Nazis to "field test" many of the weapons they would later turn on the rest of Europe and allowing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin a number of access points to up-and-coming political folks in Western Europe and the United States. They wrecked the country without much thought for the people who lived there -- many of whom spent the war dodging bullets and trying to live in the midst of all of these people supposedly fighting on their behalf.

Into the midst of this sordid slice of 20th century history, thriller writer Stephen Hunter sends Robert Florry, a shabby would-be writer coerced into spying for England's MI-6 intelligence agency. Florry is supposed to link up with his former Eton classmate, Julian Raines, who is writing about the war while also fighting in it and who may have been recruited as a Soviet spy. Florry is supposed to learn what he can about Raines' connections and loyalties, and act accordingly. The amateur spy's mission will be made that much harder by the presence of a Russian spymaster and former New York City gangster who's a part of one of the many Communist groups using the Spanish war for their own ends, as well as a young Englishwoman who is there to help the Nationalist cause and with whom Robert is falling in love.

Hunter is best known for his series of books about covert military sniper Bob Lee Swagger and wrote Tapestry of Spies (formerly The Spanish Gambit, after a chess strategy) earlier in his career. But as a movie critic for The Baltimore Sun at the time, he has plenty of writing experience and Spies features him already well in command of his pacing, narrative and style. He may write airport novels, but he writes them at a higher level than a lot of authors; one of the reasons the Swagger series gained notice and a movie deal.

Spies, though, does suffer from the fact that its bleak context settles into the characters and renders them as unpleasant as their circumstances. None of the people involved are the slightest bit likeable, and even those who may be on the side of right are folks you'd not care to spend time with -- nor are you at all assured they're on the side of right for anything like the right reasons. In the end, Spies is an excellently-prepared dish that still isn't anything you want to eat or that you enjoy if you do.

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If there was an official title called "Dean of Alternate History Novels" the competition would be for second place, because Harry Turtledove is far and away the winner. Between his imagining of how things might work if World War II was interrupted by an alien invasion or how U.S. history might have been different had Robert E. Lee not been a litterbug, Turtledove has sent his mind wandering around the land of what-ifs and found a number of treasures.

Starting in 2003, Turtledove began a series of young-adult novels featuring people who work for a company called "Crosstime Traffic." In their world, the discovered technology of moving between different histories has allowed the company to set up secret agents in different timelines where things in the past happened differently. Crosstime Traffic uses the technology to purchase things that the home timeline is a little short of and to monitor the more technologically advanced alternates that might also develop the technology and use it to attack the home timeline.

In Curious Notions, the second in the series, Paul Gomes is a Crosstime employee with his father. Together they run an electronics and toy shop in a San Francisco in which Germany won World War I and later developed atomic weapons to effectively control the world. The shop, called Curious Notions, makes money because it sells items that are better than anything available from the "native" shops. But that same feature has drawn the notice of German authorities and Chinese criminal organizations, which places Paul, his father and a "native" family to that San Francisco in the sights of two ruthless enemies.

As a young adult novel, Notions wastes little time on much beyond the story itself. The characterizations are broad, and although Turtledove includes some passages where Paul and others reflect on the implications of time travel and altering history based on one's own knowledge, he doesn't dig very deep in doing so. His workmanlike meat-and-potatoes prose doesn't really allow him to write a story for younger readers that also explores deeper questions, a la C. S. Lewis. But like the rest of the series, Curious Notions is a solid story that might make a young adult reader try to dig into some of the real history Turtledove uses and learn something as well as enjoy him or herself.