Dominion

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I thought the whole alternate history concept was excellent, and I was drawn into the whole world very well. Britain is now governed by a crypto-fascist regime headed by Max Aitken and Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. I suppose that this book might be compared, at least superficially, with It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel warning of the dangers of fascism in America. This book could have been a lot better, but it seemed to me that Sansom had written only about his own political beliefs. Before long he, together with a disparate group of Resistance activists, will find themselves fugitives in the midst of London’s Great Smog; as David’s wife Sarah finds herself drawn into a world more terrifying than she ever could have imagined.

David's wife Sarah, haunted by a powerfully evoked bereavement, is happy to keep her head down and ignore political realities until, in a brilliantly written set-piece on a smoggy Tottenham Court Road, an aspect of Auschwitz comes to London. For fourteen pages, he does this relatively well - but the final four pages are (somewhat bizarrely) taken up with a diatribe against the SNP and dismissing even the possibility that an independent future for Scotland could be anything other than a deeply retrograde step.Sansom takes a break from his Shardlake series to offer Dominion, an absorbing, thoughtful, spy-politico thriller set in the fog-ridden London of 1952 . Variations on Hitler's defeat by the allies have become a recurrent strain in the genre of counter-factual or alternative-history fiction.

It is set in 1952, twelve years after Britain surrenders to Germany and becomes a satellite state of the Third Reich.The interesting thing with alternate history novels is how much you know about that time and what is factual and what is played upon. And various characters have an unfortunate tendency to info-dump the politics of the setting at each other, in 'as-you-know-my-friend' kind of way. I loved hearing from Frank's POV for a multitude of reasons, but the most important is that his thought process is just very intriguing. The result of this freedom of information policy is that nothing major is a surprise to the reader, and there are many many scenes of characters discussing and pondering the significance of something that the reader already knows.

In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. You can't help but think this would not be allowed in Britain but then can only acknowledge that even worse things are happening all around the world. I found I had to force myself to plough on to the end, and if I hadn't been listening to the audio book version, I'm pretty sure I would have put it aside for later about halfway through and not bothered to pick it up again. The antagonist, Gunther Hoth, a Gestapo policeman hunting Fitzgerald and his Resistance colleagues, is neither stupid nor inexperienced and almost becomes a sympathetic character. And in a Birmingham mental hospital, an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle forever.The medium of fiction also allows him to get in some rather unfair digs at various historical characters (Lloyd George, Enoch Powell, Lord Beaverbrook, certain Labour leaders etc) based purely on his imagined history of how they would have supported a quasi-Nazi regime. Sansom offers us an alternative Britain in Dominion, a Britain occupied by Nazi Germany where Britain has become Hitler’s greatest ally. So, for example, in Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the second world war extends to 1947, while for Deighton it ends in 1941.