29th June 2024
CJ (Christopher John) Sansom (1952-2024) is probably best known for his novels set at the time of Henry VIII and featuring the hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. An agent of the King’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, Shardlake first appeared in Dissolution (2023).
Dominion is also a historical novel, though set in more recent times – with a prologue in 1940, the main story line in 1952 and an epilogue in 1953 – and with an alternative history being described, Britain having surrendered to Nazi Germany after the fall of France in 1940. Lord Beaverbrook is the Prime Minister, Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell are in the Cabinet and Winston Churchill is in hiding. In the opening scene, the wreath laid at the November remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph by the young Queen Elizabeth is dwarfed by the corresponding one – bearing a prominent swastika – laid by the German Ambassador, Erwin Rommel.
Sansom draws us into his alternative – and disturbing – world order: the British and French have been allowed to keep their Empires, but the Germans dominate the wealthy markets of Europe; Germany itself remains in a bloody and apparently ceaseless war with a shrunken post-Stalin Russia; successive American administrations remain aloof in their own backyard.
The author provides a similarly imaginative and dispiriting picture of the life being led by ordinary Britons – from the drabness of the clothing and the filth on the London pavements to the propagandist broadcasts of the BBC and the continual threat to ordinary citizens of falling foul of the thuggish gun-toting members of the Special Branch Auxiliaries charged with eliminating the threat of any public (or private) opposition.
One of those apparently ordinary citizens is David Fitzgerald, a 35 year-old civil servant, whose experience of the short 1939-40 War was of being evacuated from Norway after the failed campaign that brought about the downfall of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s replacement was not Churchill but Lord Halifax, who quickly agreed peace terms with Adolf Hitler. David has a supportive – but increasingly distant – wife, Sarah, and a detested brother-in-law, Steve, a preening supporter of the collaborative regime.
We are told early on that David “had to keep his cover intact, never step out of line” and it is soon revealed that he has been recruited by the Resistance, an uneasy collective of Socialists, Communists and the remains of the banned United Government party of Churchill and Clement Attlee. In addition, David is fearfully hiding another secret: his late mother was Jewish and the Home Secretary – Mosley – is keen for the remnants of British Jewry to be sent to the death camps in the East.
David agrees to undertake an unusual mission for the Resistance: to reacquaint himself with an old university friend – Frank Muncaster – who is incarcerated in a mental institution near Birmingham, following an incident with his estranged brother, Edgar, who was visiting him from America following the death of their mother. Frank is a sad individual, lonely and chronically frightened, his nerves permanently shattered (and a hand badly deformed) after his dreadful experience of being bullied at an austere Scottish public school.
Both the Resistance and the German authorities are seeking to find out if, during their altercation, Edgar revealed to Frank a vital secret relating to his scientific research in California. The German lead is Gunther Hoth, a ruthless (but clever) Gestapo officer, who is quick to deduce that David Fitzgerald is a Resistance member. There is jeopardy for David and his cell in their mission to kidnap Frank and take him to safety. And then the Great London Smog descends…
CJ Sansom’s own political perspective is not difficult to identify. “[T]he world he [David] had been brought up in and longed, deep inside, to believe still existed [was] dull and self-absorbed, ironic even about its own prejudices. But that Britain had gone, had instead turned into a place where an authoritarian government in league with Fascist thugs thrived on nationalist dreams of Empire, on scapegoats and enemies”.
What is perhaps more surprising is the scathing contempt with which Sansom describes nationalism and – especially – Scottish nationalism and the SNP. One of the characters – a Scot – lets rip: “There were some Fascist sympathisers amongst them that founded the SNP. Everything for the glorious nation… The Nats opposed conscription in 1939, sayin’ it wis against the Act of Union for Scots to be conscripted into the British army. That was more important to them than fighting the Nazis… Whenever a party tells you national identity matters more than anything else in politics, that nationalism can sort out all the other problems, then watch out, because you’re on a road that can end with fascism… Nationalists always have to have an enemy, the English or the French or the Jews, there always has tae be some other bugger that’s caused all the problems”.
Sansom continues in this vein in an Historical Note at the end of the book. In doing so, he was determinedly – and bravely – swimming against the political tide in Scotland. In 2011 – just a year before the book’s publication – the SNP under Alex Salmond had won 69 seats out of 129 in a Scottish Parliamentary election, giving it an absolute majority. Sansom’s editorial was a heartfelt plea in anticipation of the Independence Referendum, which was held in 2014.
The author was correct in arguing that “the prospective break-up of Britain [was] creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border” and it would have been to his considerable relief that the Referendum was won by the Unionist “No” side by 55% to 45%. However, his expectation that such an outcome would mean that “at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime would vanish from Europe” has turned out to be decidedly inaccurate and – for those in agreement with his views – far too optimistic.
JR Alexander 