A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. What matters is what is done with it, and Sansom has done admirably.Ī rich and densely plotted story that will make Winston Churchill buffs admire the man even more.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Dick, Len Deighton and Philip Roth have explored it, too. That scenario, after all, is not new Philip K. More important than the scenario is his careful unfolding of the vast character study that fascism affords, his portraits of those who resist and those who collaborate and why. Almost as bad as the Germans.” Sansom’s scenario is all too real, and it has sparked a modest controversy among it-couldn’t-happen-here readers across the water. If there is hope, it will come from America, where, as one dour Brit remarks, “they love their superweapons, the Americans.
His wife, for her part, is content at first to keep her head down and her mouth shut until the Final Solution comes to the sceptered isle. To judge by his name and appearance, David Fitzgerald should have no trouble in the new Britain, but his bloodline tells a different tale: “He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews”-even half-Jews, even Irish Jews. Winston Churchill, pressed to join the Quisling government, instead spearheads a vee-for-victory resistance movement, while German racial purity laws gradually come into effect on the streets of London, with most residents only too glad to be rid of the Jews meanwhile, critics of the regime, such as W.H. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they had stared the British down, won concessions from Lloyd George (who had “spent the thirties idolizing Hitler, calling him Germany’s George Washington”) and effectively made the United Kingdom a satellite of the Third Reich. Let’s suppose, as Sansom does in this long, engaging bit of speculative fiction, that the Nazis had won the war. What did you do in the war, Pater-eh, Vater?
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