If you are a fan of counterfactual history, and you wonder what might have happened in May 1940 had Lord Halifax become prime minister rather than Winston Churchill, then you will love this book. The author, C J Sansom, is a strange cove. he rose to prominence with a highly successful series of novels set in the reign of Henry VIII, all about the life of a lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. He then wrote a spy novel, WINTER IN MADRID. DOMINION and hit the headlines recently when he donated £160,000 to the BETTER TOGETHER campaign. He literally hates the SNP, which is evident at various points in the plot of DOMINION. This is his first counterfactual novel, but I suspect it won’t be his last. It’s long at 592 pages, which include a long explanatory note at the end justifying the approach he took to the book. It’s all quite convincing, because had Halifax put up a fight, there’s little doubt that he would indeed have become prime minister and I suspect sued for peace with Germany within a very short time.

The plot of this book surrounds a slightly quixotic scientist who learns that America has developed the atom bomb. The year is 1952. Queen Elizabeth is on the throne (still unmarried…) and Lord Beaverbrook is the Nazi sympathising prime minister. Somewhat bizarrely Enoch Powell is in the quisling-esque Cabinet as Secretary of State for India. Powell’s wife Pam was understandably furious with Sansom for portraying her late husband in this manner, and I suspect Jonathan Aitken is none too pleased at the portrayal of Beaverbrook. Churchill is the renegade leader of the resistance, but doesn’t feature much in the book until the end, when Hitler’s death is announced.

It’s a good yarn, but the book is at least 30% too long and bears all the hallmark of being written with the intention of turning it into a TV drama. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But although Sansom is very good at developing characters he is less good at telling a story. His writing style can at times be ponderous and lack a sense of anticipation. Many of the key points of the novel arrive with comparatively little build up. And they are then covered in a couple of paragraphs. This is especially so in the final scenes. His portrayal of a Scottish character is in some ways excellent but it is ruined by his insistence on writing his dialogue in a Scottish accent. Totally unnecessary.

But having said all that I really enjoyed the book as a whole and wanted more! It’s a good holiday read and I cant imagine anyone would get to the end and wish they hadn’t bothered.

DOMINION, by C J Sansom is published by Macmillan. You can buy it HERE

You can visit C J Sansom’s website HERE