Dominion

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The antagonist, Gunther Hoth, a Gestapo policeman hunting Fitzgerald and his Resistance colleagues, is neither stupid nor inexperienced and almost becomes a sympathetic character. By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India. Very dark, thought provoking and a rollicking good thriller - Sansom likes to put in extensive background stories for every charactet but this worked for me. The story centres around a young man of Irish and (hidden) Jewish descent who is climbing the ladder in Whitehall while also participating in the resistance movement (Led by Churchill as a Charles de Gaulle substitute).

Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given the mission to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country. A resistance movement has sprung up, and the main character in the novel, David Fitzgerald, a low level civil servant in the Dominions office, is passing them documents. Hitler is still in charge of most of Europe, but is suffering from health issues and hasn’t been seen for a long time.It is a tremendous achievement at 700 pages, and it may be that the reference to Sansom's bone marrow cancer in the note at the end of the book did indeed lead to a sense of urgency in the writing. Famous for his Shardlake Tudor series, here Sansom brings us to 1952 in an alternate, authoritarian Britain which made peace with Hitler in 1940. The uncanny ability Sansom has to tell such a vivid story of Geoff Drax and his emotions and troubles through the eyes of his friends and enemies amazes me. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers, and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk.

Sansom directly confronts the frequent, smug view in the UK that nazism and the Jewish Holocaust were inherently German perversions. It's well-conceived and enjoyable enough, but for me - and I accept this is personal preference - it fell down in a number of areas. It is 1952 and in the UK the people are ruled by a puppet government that submitted to the Nazi government in 1940 after the disaster of Dunkirk.

Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party made substantial gains in the rigged parliamentary election of 1950, is Home Secretary, in charge of the normal police and black-shirt recruited auxiliaries.