Dominion by C.J. Sansom

Chris Sansom is unwell, and I hope he recovers fully and fast.

Muriel Spark had a story that when she was a secretary at Hamish Hamilton publishers, her boss announced ‘Mr Greene’s new novel has just come in. Have it typeset will you?’. Graham Greene was so famous and reliable that nobody even read his novel in MS because they knew it would be good.

Sansom so badly wants to be Graham Greene, and so badly is how he has set out his bid in this novel. Dominion re-treads the ‘Nazi Victory’ scenario of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1982) and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1998). However the Deighton book is 334 pages and Harris is 400, so Dominion is almost the length of those two combined at 717 pages. I even recall that the Daily Mirror newspaper’s ‘Garth’ cartoon strip included an alternative history graphic novel where the Nazis won the war. A multi-author book Third Reich Victorious (2008, ed. Tsouras, esp. Peter Badsey’s chapter ‘Disaster at Dunkirk’) is a more immediate source too. All ultimately look back to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Tower, published in the 1950s.

Many say that the reason why the Millennium trilogy is so poorly written is because the author died and nobody had the nerve to edit the unwieldy draft into a workable publishable book, so on a wave of sentimentality, the books were published as received, like Graham Greene, only without the honing that Greene applied to his work. The Heart of the Matter is 288 pages, The Quiet American is 208. Yet both contain far more than this book, which is triple the length.

Briefly the plot is that a scientist who may know something about a secret weapon the Americans are working on has been locked up in an asylum  near Birmingham in alternative 1952. A small cell  of the pro-Churchill underground including of the scientist’s two university friends and a mysterious Slovak woman are sent to find out what he knows and later to spring him so he can be taken to America. The great smog of 1952 is evoked. Their Nazi SS opponent is ruthless. Everything else is elaboration. One section has a trip to Birmingham and a visit to the scientist’s flat described in vast detail twice.

What really mars this book is that is is appallingly badly edited. The manuscript must have contained masses of exposition, where characters who know each other sat down and say ‘Remember when this happened?’ and recited reams of history which they both knew about. All of this should have been struck out by the desk editor, but for reasons of sentimentality were allowed to remain. Then there are historical errors, such as the reference to a ‘motorway’ in 1952, which later becomes the Great North Road, and to a man zipping his fly in 1952, when no trousers had zips until the 1970s. In one chapter we are told a character is called Meg when the viewpoint character has no idea who she is, and while there are four viewpoint characters in the book generally, Meg briefly becomes one, although she is soon written out. Two minor characters have their surname changed and changed back.

All these things can happen in a novel when the work is not edited properly and not checked. As this was a paperback edition, it has had to be reissued and there was time to make the corrections.

Much is made, at inordinate length, about the morality of David Fitzgerald, mild mannered civil servant in the Dominions Ministry. He has a sort-of moral dilemma in that he has told his wife nothing of his involvement with the underground. Nor has he told her he is half-Jewish. This is Sansom’s attempt to write a Greene character, but Fitzgerald is a very uninteresting character. While Greene’s anti-heroes are flawed and in a moral dilemma, but the reader is not led to care about Fitzgerald.

This wrist-breaker of a book is a disappointment after the strong Shardlake series, which thankfully continues with Lamentation, and I did wonder if this novel was a bureau novel, one that the author wrote years ago but consigned to the bottom of the bureau and only dug out because the publishers, Pan Macmillan (Mantle) really wanted some product to push.

Get well, Chris, we need you back to full health.