I’VE JUST finished
reading a marvellous novel called Dominion,
by an author I shall be looking out for, C. J. Sansom.
It’s a
thriller-cum-alternative history type story, along the lines of Robert Harris’ Fatherland.
Dominion is set in an England
which made peace with Nazi Germany in 1940 – as indeed, could easily have
happened had the pacifists in the then Conservative government had their way.
The vision of our country,
as imagined by Sansom, would be a nightmare of oppression, unmitigated greyness
and barely suppressed rebellion and violence.
Why I find the story
so chilling to me personally was because it’s set in 1952 – within my own
lifetime. I remember vividly going to school in the smogs that polluted the
towns and cities in the winters of those years, and of the grim austerity of
those still-rationing bound days after the war.
If anybody still
believes it would have been better to make peace with Germany, that
indeed, we had any choice at all but to fight, I would recommend this book as a
salutary corrective.
