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Jaws Of Darkness (The Darkness book 5) by Harry Turtledove
01/10/2005 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster. 576 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7434-6852-X. 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.simonsays.co.uk
I have just read this back to back with the book 4 in the series, 'Rulers Of The Darkness'. As the blurb on the book says, 'This is a novel of world war and magic.'
As you may have read in my review of book 4, this is a rewrite of the military history of World War II but with dragons in the place of aircraft, behemoths in place of tanks and sorcery to give killing power that equates to shells, bombs and bullets.
I was rather scathing in my last review about this thinly veiled reference to our own recent history but perhaps because the names of the countries, characters and so forth proved easier to remember in this book, I found reading book 5 less confusing and more enjoyable.
Anyone who has read Harry Turtledove books before knows he used the broadest of canvases, in this case a whole world at war and describes the action from a wide variety of viewpoints.
We are in the equivalent of 1944. The Algraves (Nazi Germany) are in retreat especially along their long western frontier where they face Unkerlant under its murderous tyrant ruler, King Swemmel.(Soviet Russia and Stalin). Many of the characters and countries threw in their lot with Algrave when it seemed they could not lose. They are now having to re-consider their position. This includes the kingdom of Zuwayza. They are the gallant Finns but instead of Scandinavians in fur parkas in snowy forests they are black nudists living in a sun-baked desert.
I could go on but I have to say that if you have an interest in the military history of World War II, it is quite fun identifying some of its battles and campaigns in this book. Also Turtledove, who is very knowledgeable about this period and who has used it as a backdrop for some of his other books, brings in ideas that were never actually used but merely contemplated. For example, the plan known as Habakkuk to create giant iceberg aircraft carriers and float them down into the Atlantic are used in this story but to transport overwhelming numbers of dragons to provide air-cover for the allies landing from the sea. These are presumably the British and Americans landing at the Normandy beach heads in France (no intention to malign the Canadians and others who also landed at D-Day but I could not readily identify their countries from Turtledove's story).
As the emotion generated if one had been reading of one's own countrymen or ones own regiment is absent in this make-believe world, it perhaps enables the reader to sympathise with the characters from a country or army they would normally be antagonistic towards.
Turtledove also uses viewpoint characters who are not only soldiers, sailors and dragonmen but also civilians characters suffering the privations of hunger and bombing. The widest variety of viewpoints in every sense.
I generally like Turtledove's books and I enjoyed this one. As I have read two books in this series in a row it was easier to take in and recollect the various characters and their situations. Easier still if I had started from Book 1 and worked my way forwards, no doubt. However, I suppose this must count as a work of fantasy rather than Science Fiction and I feel that those who take their fantasy seriously would feel somewhat swizzed by what is a veiled rewrite of World War II without much else.
In conclusion, I quite enjoyed it. If you have read the earlier books this follows on with almost all the same viewpoint characters. Presumably there is one final book to come with the Gotterdamurung finale in Trapani (Berlin) and the equivalent of a nuclear bomb or two directed at the warrior race of Gyongyos (Imperial Japan), who are presently fighting both against an island enemy and the Unkerlanders. This is not quite the real events as although the Japanese army contemplated war against Russia, a bloody nose on the Manchurian border in 1938 following a clash with Soviet forces meant the Japanese Navy got their way and attacked Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong, Singapore and over-ran much of the British, Dutch and French Empires in the Far East instead. The Japanese had been fighting in China for years by then but it is interesting to contemplate what would have happened if they had tied down the Soviet Far Eastern forces so they could not come to the rescue of Moscow in late 1941 when the Germans were on the point of capturing it. Also whether the European powers would have lost their empires or lost them so quickly if that had not been captured by the Japanese during 1942.
Paul Hanley
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