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Settling Accounts Book 2: Drive To The East by Harry Turtledove
01/11/2005 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Del Rey/Ballantine Books. 594 page hardback. Price: $26.95 (US), $37.00 (CAN). ISBN: 0-345-45724-2. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.delreydigital.com
This is the latest in one of Turtledove's series that begins with what if the Confederates won the American Civil War in the 1860s? Instead of a unified USA, there are the two major and mutually hostile American states, plus British North America and the Empire of Mexico. Maximillian of Austria was made Emperor of Mexico mainly with French support but they abandoned him because of a popular rebellion which was successful at least in part because of US support. As, in Turtledove's version of events, the US lost the civil war, they did not aid the rebels and Mexico is still an empire. As the Confederates had help from Britain and France, the US has gravitated to be an ally of Imperial Germany so European politics has a very direct influence on events in North America. This seems a very credible scenario to me if the Confederacy had been successfully established.
This particular book is several down the chain from the 1860s. Events have reached the 1940s. After loosing another war in the 1880s against the South, all are involved in a revamped World War I with the US siding with the Kaiser's Germany and both triumphing over the Allies (Britain and France and the Confederacy) in 1917. The US takes Canada and Newfoundland as its share of the plunder as well as territory from the Confederacy, such as Kentucky and parts of Texas. There is now a Quisling-like French speaking state centred on Quebec.
This book starts after a Hitler-like figure, Jack Featherstone, has come to power in the Confederacy. He builds up its military strength and, when this book opens, his armies have overrun a huge part of the central part of the US reaching as far as the Great Lakes and thus cutting the US mainland in two. The US, its President dead in an air raid, are also fighting the British and French navies in the Atlantic and the Japanese in the Pacific and is apparently tottering on the point of defeat. It also has a Mormon uprising in Utah to contend with as well as increasing resistance in occupied Canada.
Those familiar with Turtledove's other books will not be surprised at the breadth of his story nor that it is told from numerous viewpoints. I have to admit not having read any of the books in this particular series other than the first one and I think this makes it difficult to pick up all the threads of what is going on. With the viewpoint changing every couple of paragraphs, it is sometimes difficult to be clear about whose side the viewpoint character is on.
Essentially, this is the battles of World War II fought in North America. The war in the East is akin to the German invasion of Russia with a prolonged battle in Pittsburg being akin to Stalingrad, for instance. The Confederates have superior tanks and other weapons but are outnumbered by the US. Just as in World War II, we see an apparently victorious and almost invincible German army ground down in the Soviet Union. Suddenly, the tide is turning against the Confederacy and their forces are in retreat as the book ends much as the Germans were in 1943.
There are other themes as well. For example, Fetherstone's Freedom Party has similar ideas to the Nazis and establishes extermination camps to dispose of the black population, many of whom have been fighting a guerrilla war in the South since the previous war. These start as labour camps but, as with the Nazis, the industrial process of killing people in huge numbers is developed.
I enjoy Turtledove's books, perhaps because I like alternative fiction. He does draw his stories on a very large canvas and as war is often a theme, especially World War II, in which he is clearly very knowledgeable they have an excitement and pace to them.
If you have been reading this series, I would imagine you will enjoy this book. If you have read some of his other books then you know what to expect. I would suggest that if you have not yet read any of this particular series you will get more out of it if you start at the first book and work forwards.
Paul Hanley
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