The Man with the Iron Heart

Rating NR Genre fantasy Author Harry Turtledove Publisher Del Rey

The Man with the Iron Heart is advertised as a novel of alternate history and chronicles the possible events following World War II’s V-E day if Hitler’s confidante Reinhard Heydrich had not been assassinated in 1943, two years before the war’s end. The book’s premise begins on shaky grounds with this supposition and takes its readers on far too many twists and turns to make the fantastic theorizing believable. Turtledove, a professor of history at UCLA, should know better than to create such a complicated alternate world out of modern history. His Nazi fanatics become suicide bombers and even plane hijackers, making the plot as far from original as possible. In a post-9/11 world, the concepts presented here are stale at best and even suggested in a far too flippant manner to be tolerated. What seems to be an example of humor here is found in a character suggesting a plane be run into the Pentagon. Ten years ago, the comment might have been seen as original, but not in 2008.

Despite praise for Turtledove’s historical vision, few critics choose to comment on the writing styles and abilities of this author, and for good reason. His characters are lifeless and yet seem to all be the same person. Even the evil “man with the iron heart” is as uncertain as the rest of them, not displaying any overbearing “iron heart” that should really cause one of the proverbial “good guys” any great fear. Turtledove’s heroes and antiheroes are lumped together in the same pool so that none seem either particularly great or evil. He portrays his characters with flaws, but not with seemingly basic human flaws. Even his military heroes and leaders are shown as sex-obsessed, careless, drunken cowards with the foulest mouths. Their dialogue does little to give the reader insight into their psyches and motivations (they perhaps have no motivations beyond sexual gratifications) and in some cases whole conversations are so riddled with profanity that the characters are uttering nothing else. With a minimum of eight main characters at all times, the reader has little ease connecting with any of them, and it doesn’t help that they are all exactly of the same nature—boring! By the end of the book, the reader does not really have any more reason to care if a character lives or not, and might even wish they could all be wiped out. Without any possibility of readers connecting with the characters, Turtledove eliminates any possibility of connecting his readers to the story itself. 

The narrative does nothing to pick up the slack in the dialog. Where the reader would expect to gain a more thorough understanding of the struggle itself—since there is no connecting to characters on an emotional level in this novel—the narrative disappoints as well. With its constant digressions and self-correcting comments, one is left completely uncertain about many points of the plot. The metaphors are profane and ugly, but often the most colorful of anything else the story has to offer. If Turtledove attempted to get rid of every needless comment in the narrative, the novel’s length would be cut in half, at least. At 500+ pages, the novel is unbearably long and takes far too long to reach its anticlimactic end. Instead of feeling like a living possibility, the story is a lifeless projection of new millennium warfare into the 1940s. Even the characters are too modern to be believable, and the religious mindset of the Middle Eastern terrorist groups seems too far-fetched to be used by the non-religious Nazi fanatics. 

Turtledove should confine himself to the history department and forget about a writing career. His books are for dark-minded souls who enjoy profanity and sexual innuendo in place of character development. His place will never be among a truly literary readership.