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Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove
01/10/2006 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Del Rey/Ballantine Books. 616 page hardback. Price: $26.95 (US), $35.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-345-45725-0. Buy Settling Accounts: The Grapple in the USA - or Buy Settling Accounts: The Grapple in the UK  check out website: www.delreybooks.com
This is another alternative reality story from Harry Turtledove. It is the latest in his series 'Settling Accounts' and is titled 'The Grapple'. Underlying the story is his very familiar theme that the Confederacy won the American Civil War of the 1860s. In this case, with British and French help. This particular book is set in the 1940s but in the aftermath of the Confederate victory. In the interim, there have been two more wars. One in the 1880s which the US government again lost and another variant of World War One but with Imperial Germany fighting alongside the US against the Confederacy and their British and French Allies. This time the US side won and they imposed a harsh peace.
Now some 20 years later, the consequences are that the Confederacy has a fascist government under an unpleasant ranter and racist called Jake Featherstone. The story has the Confederacy as a thinly veiled Nazi Germany invading an equally thinly disguised US as Stalin's USSR. In the earlier books in this series the better trained, better equipped soldiers of the Confederacy have carved up US territory but outnumbered there were never quite enough of them to bring the US finally to its knees. As this book opens, they have had an army surrounded and destroyed in Pittsburg (Stalingrad) and the long retreat is beginning back into their homeland. The US always had more men, it is now producing more and better weapons and its soldiers are becoming more skilled in using them.
The former black slaves had long since been liberated in the South but Featherstone's odious regime adopts its own final solution for them just as Hitler did with Jews, Gypsies and others his regime regarded as undesirable. The Blacks are seen to be disposed off in the same manner as the Holocaust. A production line of death with gas chambers and cremation ovens. The Confederacy produces its own wonderweapons to stop the rot, an equivalent of the V2 rocket and a handheld anti-tank launcher but still the retreat goes on and as this book finishes the Confederacy stands poised on the brink of being overrun.
As is often the case, Harry Turtledove uses multiple viewpoint characters and sets his story across a very broad canvas -geographical, political and military. Ranging from naval engagements against the Japanese around Midway island to surreptitious landings against British Ireland. We see air and land engagements across the battlefronts in America including tank battles, guerrilla ambushes and street fighting. The viewpoint characters are Congressional representitives politicking, generals organising and acting to the ordinary grunts in the foxholes and the civilians cowering from air-raids or being disposed of in gas chambers.
You will need to have read the earlier books in this series to make sense of this one but if you have, and I think especially if you have some knowledge of events during World War II, you will enjoy this book. Harry Turtledove is, as always, especially good at his descriptions of combat. Also the joys of living in slit trenches and the like. He brings it all very much to life.
Paul Hanley
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