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Speculative fiction is a genre dealing with what-ifs. In this context, Elleander Morning belongs to what one might rightfully (and whimsically) call “WW2-whatif-fiction”. We’ve had several stories dealing with an alternative world where Nazi Germany has won the Second World War. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick probably remains the point of reference, though in recent years Fatherland by Robert Harris has also received quite a bit of attention.

Elleander Morning is indeed such a novel, with a sort of a twist: the Second World War has never happened. The reason? A young woman – Elleander Morning – travels to Vienna before the outbreak of the First World War and kills a mediocre artist called Adolf Hitler. Many decades later, in the early 1980s, Elleander Morning’s granddaughter, Lesley, discovers a book. It’s a complete history of World War Two, including marvelous photographs that cannot be dismissed as a forgery. Something odd is going on, but what? Well, that’s a damn good question. One that sadly not even the author, Jerry Yulsman, seems to have been able to answer.

Genre, Plot, and Narrative

The first warning sign about the kind of book I was about to read lay already on the front cover. However, I didn’t notice it until later. According to the Chicago Tribute reviewer, the novel was “a real thriller and a hypnotizing romance”. I don’t know how real and how hypnotizing, respectively, they were, but the reviewer is right: there are more than one books in there.

How many Plots, really?

All in all, I could count at least four plots, maybe more. You have the main story, which is a Second World War that never was. Then you have the romance, in the form of a wholly unrealistic connection between a German diplomat and Lesley Morning, the protagonist (which really isn’t, more about that later). The reader must endure another plot in the backstory behind Elleander Morning herself. This also includes a subplot of two sisters who are forced to prostitution at the age of twelve.

All these secondary plots are almost entirely meaningless, and one wonders whether the author added them simply to reach the target length of the novel. Without them, Elleander Morning would come in the form of a novella. It would work better like that, perhaps.

Plot Holes Galore

Even when sticking to the main storyline, things disintegrate pretty rapidly. The basic idea is this: WW2 never happened, but there is this highly accurate book that describes it. Some people in power, seeing this book, think “Hmm… this WW2 isn’t such a bad idea after all”. All this occurs with improbable, highly unrealistic rapidity. It gives the reader the impression it all happens overnight: a German politician going to bed as a part of a peaceful world, then waking up wanting to exterminate the Jews and “make Germany great again”. It almost reads as a parody of its own self.

The worst aspect of them all is the author’s failed attempts to explain exactly how did Elleander Morning conceive the idea to kill Adolf Hitler and prevent WW2. Even if the reader approached the novel as one belonging to the magic realism or even the fantasy genre, it makes no sense whatsoever. An event can be fantastic or even supernatural, as long as it maintains internal consistency. In other words, an author is free to choose any narrative path, as long as the subsequent repercussions make sense. This is not the case with Elleander Morning.

An Idea and a Narrative are Two Different Things

Indeed, as I was reading, witnessing an increasingly less coherent narrative, I wondered whether the author found himself in the midst of a plot so complicated that he could no longer control it. It starts with a good idea, but ideas and narratives are not the same thing.

An idea doesn’t have to make sense, but a narrative does. I speculate that the author became too enthralled by his grand idea (which was indeed a good premise to begin with), but eventually couldn’t contain its unraveling nature. It’s a bit like lying: doing it once is easy, but in order to maintain coherence you soon need to lie again. Then you must keep lying, in a desperate attempt to maintain coherence. Inevitably, at some point, the lie can no longer be maintained.

Characters

There isn’t much to say here. It’s a genre novel (more than one of them, actually), which means characters are generally shallow, highly stereotyped and, frankly, boring. The ostensible protagonist, Lesley Morning, isn’t interesting or engaging at all, because any background information is diluted in the flood of pointless subplots about her grandmother, Elleander Morning, and the twin sisters.

Elleander Morning: General Impression

Perhaps it started as a good, even great idea: what kind of world would we be living in if the Second World War had never happened? Are certain events inevitable? The questions were great, but the attempt to answer them disastrous.

A Promising Beginning…

The first third of the narrative works reasonably well: the pace is good, and the descriptions of an alternative 1983 are engaging enough. Still, even then, there is a lot of room for improvement. The what-ifs limit themselves to a couple of technological differences. For instance, there are 4000-mile-per-hour trains, but apparently people still take a ship to cross the Atlantic. There is no kind of insight into deeper philosophical issues.

There is no real reference to what-ifs of politics, either. For a novel of speculative fiction, Elleander Morning appears too timid to speculate. It is as if it’s not an alternative universe at all. Except for a couple of short paragraphs here and there, formatted as article snippets, the author doesn’t seem interested in describing whether there had been a Cold War, Vietnam or, say, what happened to JFK.

… Rapidly Losing Steam

After this first part, things fall apart rapidly. Elleander Morning becomes too preoccupied with non-pertinent details and subplots, losing track of the main plot. As a result, things seem to move forward with unrealistic rapidity. It all appears as a parody of itself, which is an awful thing for a speculative-fiction novel.

This only gets worse because of the author’s insistence on subplots. The Chicago Tribune reviewer calls it a “hypnotizing romance”, and yes, I can admit it. It’s totally hypnotizing, because it puts the reader to sleep. The romance plot also disintegrates into pointlessness. Imagine a Romeo and Juliet with swastikas, and you won’t be far off.