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Summary
Summary
C.J. Sansom rewrites history in a thrilling novel that dares to imagine Britain under the thumb of Nazi Germany.
1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany. The global economy strains against the weight of the long German war against Russia still raging in the east. The British people find themselves under increasingly authoritarian rule -- the press, radio, and television tightly controlled, the British Jews facing ever greater constraints.
But Churchill's Resistance soldiers on. As defiance grows, whispers circulate of a secret that could forever alter the balance of the global struggle. The keeper of that secret? Scientist Frank Muncaster, who languishes in a Birmingham mental hospital.
Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, a spy for the Resistance and University friend of Frank's, is given the mission to rescue Frank and get him out of the country. Hard on his heels is Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth, a brilliant, implacable hunter of men, who soon has Frank and David's innocent wife, Sarah, directly in his sights.
C.J. Sansom's literary thriller Winter in Madrid earned Sansom comparisons to Graham Greene, Sebastian Faulks, and Ernest Hemingway. Now, in his first alternative history epic, Sansom doesn't just recreate the past -- he reinvents it. In a spellbinding tale of suspense, oppression and poignant love, Dominion dares to explore how, in moments of crisis, history can turn on the decisions of a few brave men and women -- the secrets they choose to keep and the bonds they share.
Author Notes
Christopher John "C.J." Sansom is a British writer of crime novels. He was born in 1952 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he earned a B. A. and a PhD in History. He practiced law, before quitting to work full-time as a writer. He currently lives in Sussex, England.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the intriguing prologue of Sansom's solid what-if historical thriller, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax succeeds Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 9, 1940, instead of Winston Churchill. Later that year, Britain makes peace with Germany. Flash forward to 1952. While the country is not technically under Nazi occupation, its citizens live in fear of speaking their minds, and Churchill heads a shadowy resistance movement. David Fitzgerald, a senior official in the Dominions Office, begins to rebel against his country's leadership after the tragic accidental death of his almost-three-year-old son, and is tapped to aid the resistance in a plan to free a scientist who carries a potentially world-changing secret. Sansom's prose is as assured as ever, but his plotting doesn't match that of his clever Elizabethan historicals (Dissolution, etc.). Fans of such Nazi triumphant novels as Len Deighton's SS-GB and Robert Harris's Fatherland will find this a satisfying, if more predictable read. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The second world war is such a pivotal event in human history that generations have inevitably speculated about what might have happened had the momentum swung slightly another way. Variations on Hitler's defeat by the allies have become a recurrent strain in the genre of counter-factual or alternative-history fiction. The premise of a German and Japanese triumph has inspired writers from Philip K Dick to Robert Harris, whose Fatherland (1992) consciously offers a German-American parallel to the Nazi-invaded Britain of Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978); in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, President Roosevelt loses the 1940 US election to the isolationist, pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh. Now comes CJ Sansom's provocative thriller Dominion, depicting a Britain that surrendered to Germany on 9 May 1940 - the day before Churchill, in the real world, became PM - and now serves as a satellite state of a triumphant Third Reich. Although the field sounds crowded, one of the pleasures of these books is the way in which writers have found their own space, often through an autobiographical concern. Roth, extending his depiction of the Jewish experience in America, imagined a US in which antisemitism had become federal policy rather than a dirty social reflex. And Sansom, born in 1952, sets the main action of Dominion in that year, vividly dramatising a Britain foreign to the one of his childhood. With counter-factual fiction, you pull out one thing and the rest unravels. 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. A single alteration of history - such as, in Sansom's vision, Lord Halifax rather than Churchill holding sway over the war cabinet in 1940 - can have repercussions all over the globe. In this respect, one of the thrills of Dominion is to see a writer whose previous talent has been for the captivating dramatisation of real history (in his five books about the Tudor sleuth, Matthew Shardlake, and the Spanish civil war novel Winter in Madrid) creating an invented mid-20th century Britain that has the intricate detail and delineation of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth, though thankfully described in better prose. The big historical sweeps seem credible guesses: the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook - an isolationist, pro-German equivalent to Roth's President Lindbergh - is prime minister, with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as home secretary, while Churchill is the leader of an underground resistance movement that occasionally daubs V signs in public places. In America, Adlai Stevenson has just won the 1952 election. In recorded history, Stevenson was thrashed by D-day hero General Dwight Eisenhower, but, in this version, there hasn't been an Allied victory to gild Ike's reputation and so he hasn't even run for the Republicans. Sansom is equally impressive in the depth of the background colour. Air-raid shelters - never, as it turned out, needed - are items of poignant incongruity. Conversations glancingly reveal that what we know as the London and Helsinki Olympics of 1948 and 1952 took place in quite different countries because of the alterations in the geo-political situation. Leading British authors of the period - EM Forster, JB Priestley, WH Auden - have disappeared ominously from view after criticising our political masters in Berlin. A massive picture of Hitler hangs in the lobby of the National Portrait Gallery. Our guide through this fiercely seen fantasy Albion is David Fitzgerald, a civil servant who has disguised an aspect of his family history in order to flourish under the regime. 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. 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. Because they are dead, defamation is no legal risk, but there may still be moral jeopardy. Beyond the possible unhappiness of the descendants of Beaverbrook and Enoch Powell at their actions in this book, feminist and Scottish readers respectively may gasp at the suggestion that Marie Stopes is advising the Ministry of Health on eugenic sterilisation and that the Scots Nats have enthusiastically signed up to the Hitler agenda. But, as in all the best war-related alternative fiction, the finger of suspicion also jabs uncomfortably at the reader. Sansom directly confronts the frequent, smug view in the UK that nazism and the Jewish Holocaust were inherently German perversions. The English, in this version, prove just as susceptible to strong but psychotic leadership and the prospect of racist genocide. The song from Cabaret that poses the question "What Would You Do?" might be the theme tune to a tremendous novel that shakes historical preconceptions to chilling effect. Mark Lawson's Enough is Enough: Or the Emergency Government is published by Picador. To order Dominion for pounds 15.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Mark Lawson Caption: Captions: Minister of Supply Lord Beaverbrook addressing Clydeside shop stewards, 1941 The premise of a German and Japanese triumph has inspired writers from Philip K Dick to Robert Harris, whose Fatherland (1992) consciously offers a German-American parallel to the Nazi-invaded Britain of Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978); in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, President Roosevelt loses the 1940 US election to the isolationist, pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh. Now comes CJ Sansom's provocative thriller Dominion, depicting a Britain that surrendered to Germany on 9 May 1940 - the day before Churchill, in the real world, became PM - and now serves as a satellite state of a triumphant Third Reich. With counter-factual fiction, you pull out one thing and the rest unravels. 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. A single alteration of history - such as, in Sansom's vision, Lord Halifax rather than Churchill holding sway over the war cabinet in 1940 - can have repercussions all over the globe. In this respect, one of the thrills of Dominion is to see a writer whose previous talent has been for the captivating dramatisation of real history (in his five books about the Tudor sleuth, Matthew Shardlake, and the Spanish civil war novel Winter in Madrid) creating an invented mid-20th century Britain that has the intricate detail and delineation of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth, though thankfully described in better prose. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
What did you do in the war, Pater--eh, Vater? Let's suppose, as Sansom does in this long, engaging bit of speculative fiction, that the Nazis had won the war. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they had stared the British down, won concessions from Lloyd George (who had "spent the thirties idolizing Hitler, calling him Germany's George Washington") and effectively made the United Kingdom a satellite of the Third Reich. Winston Churchill, pressed to join the Quisling government, instead spearheads a vee-for-victory resistance movement, while German racial purity laws gradually come into effect on the streets of London, with most residents only too glad to be rid of the Jews; meanwhile, critics of the regime, such as W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster, have been silenced. To judge by his name and appearance, David Fitzgerald should have no trouble in the new Britain, but his bloodline tells a different tale: "He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews"--even half-Jews, even Irish Jews. His wife, for her part, is content at first to keep her head down and her mouth shut until the Final Solution comes to the sceptered isle. If there is hope, it will come from America, where, as one dour Brit remarks, "they love their superweapons, the Americans. Almost as bad as the Germans." Sansom's scenario is all too real, and it has sparked a modest controversy among it-couldn't-happen-here readers across the water. More important than the scenario is his careful unfolding of the vast character study that fascism affords, his portraits of those who resist and those who collaborate and why. That scenario, after all, is not new; Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and Philip Roth have explored it, too. What matters is what is done with it, and Sansom has done admirably. A rich and densely plotted story that will make Winston Churchill buffs admire the man even more.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Sansom is known primarily for his series of historical novels featuring sixteenth-century lawyer Matthew Shardlake, but Winter in Madrid (2008), a spy thriller set in 1940, brought the author some serious acclaim. More is sure to follow with this gripping alternate-history story set in England in the early 1950s. David Fitzgerald, a civil servant, is a member of the Resistance, a group dedicated to expelling the Nazis from England (in Sansom's version of twentieth-century history, England surrendered to Hitler in May 1940). When David is given a very delicate assignment extricate scientist Frank Muncaster from a mental hospital before the Nazis discover the potentially world-altering secrets in Muncaster's possession he doesn't count on being pursued by a relentless Gestapo agent, Gunther Hoth, who will stop at nothing to silence Muncaster. A race-against-time thriller set against an imaginative and internally consistent historical backdrop, the novel should definitely appeal to fans of alternate history, especially the WWII novels of Harry Turtledove or Robert Conroy, and, of course, Robert Harris' classic Fatherland (1992).--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Neville Chamberlain's preferred successor as Britain's prime minister in May 1940 was his dour foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, not the brilliant but sometimes rash Winston Churchill. Sansom's new stand-alone (after Winter in Madrid) ponders what might have happened if Chamberlain had had his way: a surrendered Britain at peace following the fall of France and governed by the likes of Max Beaverbrook, Oswald Moseley, and other quislings under Hitler's thumb; a Nazi Germany still caught in a seemingly endless death struggle deep within the vastness of Russia; and a United States (under Adlai Stevenson!) still aloof from foreign entanglement. Sansom's alternative world feels genuine and includes delicious scenes such as a sappy, smiling Hitler riding down the Mall beside George VI in the golden State Coach while the stone-faced king bites his stiff upper lip. The protagonists include Frank Muncaster, the brother of an American-based nuclear scientist, attempting to deny Germany the secrets of the atomic bomb, civil servant (and spy for the English Resistance) David Fitzgerald, whose Jewish heritage must eventually affect his survival in a country slowly going mad, and Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth. VERDICT This speculative and intriguing thriller sucks readers into an alternative world that reveals its rewritten history only slowly, creating in us a page-turning craving for the details. Recommended for fans of World War II and totalitarian-era political fiction, history buffs, and those who enjoy alternative history generally. [See Prepub Alert, 7/29/13.]-Vicki Gregory, Sch. of Information, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
