Dominion

[sawyl]

Thanks to a chance comment from Dr S, I've been reading my way through CJ Sansom's novel Dominion. Set in an alternate version of 1952, where Halifax and not Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940 with suitably disastrous consequences, it follows a British Resistance agent as he struggles to try and keep a key secret out of the hands of the nazis and their collaborators in the government.

When Frank Muncaster's mother dies, his obnoxious brother comes over from the US for the funeral. In a moment of drunken stupidity, Edgar Muncaster, a physicist working at UC Berkeley, tells Frank everything about his highly sensitive work. Frank snaps, pushes his brother out of the window, smashes up his flat whilst raving about the end of the world and gets himself sent to a local mental hospital for his troubles. As soon as Edgar is whisked back to the US and debriefed, the Americans contact the Resistance with the news that the secret that Frank now holds in his head is of such importance that it must be kept from the Germans at all costs.

Meanwhile, back in London, Frank's old university chum David Fitzgerald is living a fractured life. To the world at large, he seems to be a respectable cvil servant; to his wife, he seem to be a man having an affair with one of his underlings; to himself, he's a secular Jew mourning the death of his young son; but to the Resistance, he's their mole in the Dominions Office. Which makes him ideal when someone decides to come up with the idea of getting Frank out of the hospital and off to the US.

But the Germans aren't entirely ignorant of events. Gunther Hoth, a Gestapo officer from Berlin, has been dispatched to work discreetly with the SS and Special Branch in order to discover exactly what information Edgar Muncaster might have passed on to his brother. Forced to avoid direct contract with the British, Hoth is unable to act in time to prevent Frank from slipping through his fingers. After that he and his British sidekick, the unlikeable Inspector Syme, are forced to play cat and mouse with Frank's abductors, trying to pin them down even while London struggles its way through the Great Smog.

Despite its doorstopping size, Dominion is a quick and easy read, and entertaining enough in its way. It suffers from some awkward exposition especially in the early stages, I'm not sure that some of the characters convinced me, and it's rather long for what it is, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The plot is a largely a nonsense, with Frank's secret a clear McGuffin that doesn't make a great deal of sense. Firstly, it's not clear why the Americans want access to Frank rather than his simple removal. Secondly, the idea that Edgar might have been able to pass on the secret of atomic weapons in a single, brief conversation seems wrong: simply knowing of the existence of U235, as Frank seems to, is a long way from having a working method of separating the isotopes. But if you igore that and concentrate on the world building, things go rather more satisfactorily.

Because where the book really scores is its vision of fascist Britain, with Beverbrook as PM and Oswald Mosley as his Home Secretary. Without the social changes brought about by Britain's involvement in WWII, society is staid and class-bound. For example, Fitzgerald's wife Sarah is deeply bored but unable to work following her marriage; while Carol Bennett, a file clerk in the Dominions Office, is portrayed as a spinsterish bluestocking whose quiet desperation leaves her open to David's manipulative advances. The Civil Service, too, seems to be stuck in a time-warp with gold letters of the senior men on their office doors and quaint senses of decency — David is able to dodge his boss at a critical moment by claiming to have been in the lavatory, safe in the knowledge that the man would be too punctilious to check them. But when push comes to shove and the old civil servants are no match for the new men of the fascist state, falling to pieces when the realise that everything they've worked for has been taken away from them and they've been betrayed by the people beneath them.

Enjoyable but problematic.