Dominion

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Sansom offers us an alternative Britain in Dominion, a Britain occupied by Nazi Germany where Britain has become Hitler’s greatest ally. Why on earth would the Germans have erected tariff barriers against British produce when such produce, particularly in armaments, would have been vital for the continuing campaign in the east? There is a paucity of interesting narrative in the novel, caused by the heavy attention to historical detail and certain ideas therein.

Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of having to fill in the counter-factual historical gaps over such a huge period as 12 years. As David’s spying is exposed, he and his cell look at extracting Frank from the mental hospital and getting him to America with his secret. This is an alternative vision of 50s Great Britian after the war, as if Churchill did not take power and we do not win the war in 1945.It read to me very much like the author didn't really know how he was going to end it until he started writing the last chapter. Through the tall windows and warm spring day was fading, shadows lengthening on Horse Guards Parade. There are a lot of links to be made and they have to be explained somehow but this leads to some very bizarre conversations where one character is giving another a details of the past that the recipient would already know.

Famous for his Shardlake Tudor series, here Sansom brings us to 1952 in an alternate, authoritarian Britain which made peace with Hitler in 1940. I admire his talent for writing fight sequences and action scenes because I, myself, find it difficult and I think it's hard for someone to make it realistic and believable.In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. As an observer you want them to be honest with each other but understand that each is trying to protect the other.

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.He befriends another lady in the same department, and surreptitiously obtains her key to the secret cabinet. But though I have never read a Harris book that was less than five stars, this one of Sansom's, I'm afraid, is closer to four. Samson has simply advanced beyond his fictitious present to a real future, to Powell’s 1960s warning over the possible effects of mass immigration. It is 1952 and in the UK the people are ruled by a puppet government that submitted to the Nazi government in 1940 after the disaster of Dunkirk.

By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India. There are women and men willing to risk their lives for what they believe in, but also Nazi sympathizers, some with important government positions, well-known names such as Enoch Powell, Lords Halifax and Beaverbrook. 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. Sansom makes him such a sad, forlorn soul it was hard not to feel sorry for him and want to give him a big hug.A complication of second world war counter-history, as Sansom acknowledges in an afterword, is that depictions of a German victory involve fingering historical British figures as Nazi collaborators. A few things have changed, of course: the Jewish-owned Lyons Corner Houses are now British Corner Houses, and right-wing politicians such as Mosley and Powell are in the ascendant, though other latterly-famous names such as Butler and Douglas-Home nonetheless have senior positions in the post-treaty government. A review in The Guardian conceded that some individuals are depicted in light that is less than favourable in the fictional work: "Because they are dead, defamation is no legal risk, but there may still be moral jeopardy. A resistance movement has sprung up, and the main character in the novel, David Fitzgerald, a low level civil servant in the Dominions office, is passing them documents. The elements of the plot are good too, from the gloomy despondent population that are slowly being oppressed, but have a glimmer of hope from the resistance under Churchill, to a Germany poised on the edge of civil war.