Dominion by C.J. Sansom 1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers, and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled; the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. There are terrible rumours too about what is happening in the basement of the German Embassy at Senate House. Defiance, though, is growing. In Britain, Winston Churchills Resistance organisation is increasingly a thorn in the governments side. 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. Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given by them the mission to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country. 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. And hard on their heels is Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer Gunther Hoth, brilliant, implacable hunter of men. Sansom came to prominence with his series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century. The series main character is the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who is assisted in his adventures by Mark Poer and then Jack Barak. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation and Queen Catherine Parr in Heartstone. Sansom has said that he plans to write further Shardlake novels taking the lawyer into the reign of Elizabeth I. Sansoms alternate history novel Dominion, set in a Britain following a fictional Axis victory in World War II, depicts several historical figures (among them Lord Beaverbrook, Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell, and Marie Stopes) as members of a Quisling puppet government. Powells depiction in particular provoked controversy: Journalist Peter Hitchens called it a babyish, historically illiterate slur and called on Sansom to apologise to Powells family. Allan Massie for The Daily Telegraph, however, defended the portrayal, arguing that in the make-believe world of counter-factual history, a novelist is entitled to take a different line and that having a younger version of Powell be as such was not inherently improbable. The book was adapted in 10 episodes for BBC Radio 4, in September 2012. Dominion was also nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Born in Scotland, Sansom is an opponent of Scottish independence, a prospect he describes as literally heartbreaking. Following the publication of his 2012 novel Dominion, which depicted the Scottish National Party as collaborators with the British Nazi state, he described the party as deeply dangerous, with no politics in the conventional sense, believing only in the old dream that the unleashing of national spirit and national pride can solve a countrys problems. He donated £161,000 to the Better Together group, which campaigns for a no vote in the Scottish independence referendum, 2014. He has also written Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Schoolboy rivalries in the Spanish civil war Matthew Alexander reviews Winter in Madrid by C J Sansom. C. J. Sansom has earned a genre-transcending reputation with his first two novels, the 16th-century crime thrillers Dissolution and Dark Fire ; a third novel in the series featuring the hunchbacked Tudor detective Matthew Shardlake is to be published later this year. Winter in Madrid is a departure: the main action takes place during the winter of 1940 in the civil war-ravaged Spanish capital, as Franco teeters on the brink of joining the Second World War in an alliance with Germany and political division casts a pall of suspicion over the city. Away from the crumbling Madrid streets, of which Sansom paints a terrifying picture, the political manoeuvring and subterfuge of the rival interests in the country - Falangists, pro-monarchists, militarists, Socialists - is becoming increasingly desperate. Harry Brett enters this world after a surprise recruitment into the intelligence service having been invalided out of the army with shellshock at Dunkirk. He is to spy on his old schoolfriend Sandy Forsyth, now a somewhat shady ex-pat profiteer. Harry is a complex, sensitive soul, who clings to the values of decency and structure learnt at Rookwood, his public school (from which the embittered Forsyth was expelled after a cruel act of revenge on his arachnophobic housemaster). Sandy is not Harrys only rebellious friend from Rookwood who finds his way to wartime Spain: Bernie Piper, a handsome scholarship boy and avowed Communist, has been imprisoned in a Falangist labour camp after fighting for the Reds: officially, he is missing believed dead. Barbara Clare, Pipers former lover and now the dispirited wife of Sandy Forsyth, receives information that Bernie is alive: she sets out to find him and to engineer an escape, keeping it all secret from Forsyth (who hates Piper). There are shades of Julian Mitchells Another Country in the portrayal of public-school ideological rebellion, and throughout Sansom offers an intriguing and equivocal vision of a country in ideological turmoil, to which the three Rookwood men are drawn by separate but equally powerful motives. This is above all a novel about systems of authority and ideology: always, in the end, corrupting and corruptible, both beyond and beneath the scope of individual heroism. Forsyth is foiled, Bernie rescued, and Harry sacked for his part in arranging the escape by the furious ambassador. This is a fine thing for the new man on the Madrid desk in London to have to deal with, he barks. Whats his name? Philby, sir. Kim Philby. My nightmare of a Nazi Britain How the rising tide of nationalism – not least in Scotland – made CJ Sansom rewrite the second world war CJ Sansom The Guardian, Friday 19 October 2012 08.00 BST Caption: Oswald Mosley at an East London fascist rally in October 1936 After writing six historical novels in a row, with my latest novel Dominion I have fulfilled a long-held ambition and written an alternate history novel, a what-if. I remember, as a history student in the 70s, reading Len Deightons novel SS-GB, an alternate history in which Germany has successfully invaded Britain in 1940 and the country is divided between resisters and collaborators. Its imagining of a defeated Britain rife with spies stuck with me, and I became a fan of second world war alternate history novels, especially Robert Harriss Fatherland, which I think is the best. Most such novels imagine a successful invasion of Britain, but my own reading convinced me that, militarily, Germanys planned 1940 invasion could not have succeeded, given Britains control of the air and the sea. So I turned to another option, which very nearly happened – Neville Chamberlain being succeeded as prime minister in 1940 not by Winston Churchill but by fellow-appeaser Lord Halifax. Most of the Conservative Party, Chamberlain himself, and the King, wanted Halifax, not Churchill, to lead the proposed new coalition government, and the Labour Party left it to the Conservatives to decide. Halifaxs doubts about his ability to be a war leader gave Churchill the post. If Halifax had assumed the position I think he would have made peace after Dunkirk; he certainly argued for doing so then. The terms would have been Britain keeping her empire and leaving Germany a free hand in Europe. I think, as Churchill did, that had this happened Britain would inevitably have ended up as a German satellite. In Dominion, rigged elections have, by 1952, brought an increasingly authoritarian Britain run by Lord Beaverbrook and Oswald Mosley, while the growing strength – and violent actions – of the British Resistance, led by Churchill and Attlee, have led to the government allowing an expanded Special Branch and Auxiliary Police force to crack down ferociously on dissent, with the Gestapo in the background, while Germany increasingly presses Britain to deport its Jews for resettlement in the East. Dominion is a book about resisters and collaborators. The resisters are not all shining heroes. Nor are the collaborators all monsters. Some are motivated by fanatical nationalism, others are venal, but others are pacifists, while everyone fears threats not just to themselves but their families. The books central character, David, is a civil servant secretly supplying information to the resistance. But he is full of conflict – over his part-Jewish background, which he has kept secret even from his wife Sarah, and over the dangers his activities could place her in. Sarah comes from a family of pacifists, some of whom are now collaborators, and the way she, and they, react to developing events is a major theme of the book. David is sent on a dangerous mission and he and a group of fellow-resisters are pursued across a shabby, frightened Britain by a relentless Gestapo agent, Gunther Hoth. With Gunther I have tried showing something different to a stock Nazi, and he has some of the features of the classic modern detective – he is shambling and awkward, with a disastrous personal life, but also a brilliant and intrepid detective and hunter of – in his eyes – wrongdoers. He has an unshakeable moral compass. Unfortunately this is Nazism, and he is capable of its most appalling acts. But how a decent enough young German became a slave to Hitlers ideas is also part of the tale. In writing my historical novels I have always tried to be as accurate as possible in conveying the world of the story. That is a hard task, but in Dominion there was the additional challenge that my 1950s never actually existed. I had to think through the developments I thought would have taken place in Britain after surrender – political, social, cultural. For example TV, which had just got started before the war closed it down, returns in 1940 not 1945, is more widespread and under increasing government control. There was no blitz, no Attlee government or welfare state. The world I have created is, I hope, recognisably the early 50s, but warped and twisted and impoverished, its worst aspects exaggerated. In the wider world of the story America, after Britains surrender, did a deal with the Japanese and retreated into isolation. All Europe is under Germanys heel, and with Britain gone from the field Hitler invaded Russia earlier and with more troops. However, unlike in some alternate history novels, the Third Reich is not triumphant. Hitlers Russian war has gone on for 11 years, sucking the resources of Germany and all Europe into the limitless territories of the Soviet Union. Hitlers Parkinsons Disease has left him a disabled recluse. Riven with internal conflict, the Nazi regime is on the edge of collapse. I always thought the whole Nazi enterprise was far more fragile than many think. Why write this novel now? The main reason was that, having written four Tudor novels in a row I badly needed a break from Henry VIIIs England. But also, during the last two years as I wrote the book, the evils of politics based on race and nationalism – its dominant theme – came to the fore again in Europe as economic crisis gripped the continent and many people responded, as they had in the 30s, by turning to nationalist solutions. I find the free-market ideology that has dominated the world for the past 30 years, and brought us to our present ruin, a dogma that has failed repeatedly and disastrously, but politics based on national identity is even more dangerous; anti-rational, demagogic, assuming individuals should be defined by their nationality, and, always, against an enemy. Tragically, and unlike in the 1930s, nationalisms are on the rise in Britain as elsewhere in Europe, with Ukip and, north of the border, the Scottish National Party. In Dominion I have gone to town on the SNPs opposition to actively fighting fascism, which was also true in the real world. I make no apology for using the book to stress how I see the SNP, for all the moderate face it currently presents, as deeply dangerous, with no politics in the conventional sense, believing only in the old dream that the unleashing of national spirit and national pride can solve a countrys problems.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 07:11:29 +0000
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