Dominion

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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. And so it goes on, from high tension to low comedy, a series of increasingly implausible encounters. The far right in Europe is active in the 2020s which makes this novel as relevant now as when it was written.

Historical fiction is always a challenge but to use a historical setting which you twist from reality is on another level.I don't want to give too much away from this point on because this is where we start to get the twists and turns I'm used to from Sansom's books and the reason I adore his works so much. Counter-factuals are all the rage these days, even creeping into genuine historical accounts: I recently read a (factual) book on the Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis where he slipped a limited Nuclear attack by the USA on North Korea in 1951 into the start of one chapter, only to tell the reader two pages later that it had been a "what if".

This book was marketed as if the whole story was David Fitzgerald and his comrades as fugitives in the Great Smog, but it was so much more than that. Counter-factual fiction is subject to a phenomenon variously expressed in metaphors involving butterfly wings, loose threads in sweaters and lines of dominoes: pull out one thing and the rest unravels. Valstybės tarnautojas Davidas Fitzgeraldas, slapta veikiantis kaip Pasipriešinimo organizacijos šnipas, gauna užduotį išgelbėti savo seną mokslų universitete laikų draugą Franką ir išvežti jį iš šalies.But what of people who did not grow up in Britain around this time; must they rely on other reading to provide the background against which Sansom's book works so brilliantly? However, when he switches to the main plot line – the thriller/adventure story, things begin to go awry.

Rytuose tebesitęsia ilgas Vokietijos karas su Rusija, o britai atsiduria tamsioje autoritarinėje valdžioje: spauda, radijas ir televizija kontroliuojami, gatvėse patruliuoja smurtaujanti pagalbinė policija, o Britanijos žydai susiduria su vis didesniais suvaržymais. Everyone hears Frank screaming, repeating over and over, 'the World is coming to an end' all the while trashing his apartment, sadly for Frank his descent into hell has just begun; he is packed off to a lunatic asylum. 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. Sansom also nails his colours to the mast about the sadness of the descent into Brexit ( I share his views).Subsequently Britain surrenders to the threat of Nazi invasion and becomes a puppet state of the Third Reich. In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. Indeed his greatest opprobrium is reserved for the Scottish Nationalist Party and, rather bizarrely, the very last pages of his postscript reveal that the main purpose of the novel seems to be to weigh into the current debate on Scottish Independence.