Just plodded through a glum, gray slab of pudding called Dominion. An alternate-history thriller that goes on for 690 pages: large type, thankfully. Britain lives in Germany’s shadow after making peace with Hitler; now a Nazi hunts an idealistic British civil servant and a disturbed, fragile scientist whose secret could change the balance of world power. The three characters call to mind a routine the novelist Mark Halperin would do for audiences. He’d say Italian movies always opened with the hero parked in a bleak industrial setting. The hero would rub his eyes and on the soundtrack you’d hear “Sono stanco. Sono sempre stanco,” meaning “I’m tired. I am always tired.” If there can be standard middle-aged despair, off-the-shelf malaise, and boilerplate existential suffering, that’s the kind these people have.
Also, a what-if book about Nazis isn’t as groundbreaking as some reviewers seem to think, and the dialogue goes clunk. Sometimes it explains, as when a German talks to his grown son in a flashback: “The train will take you across the Polish Corridor, the part of Germany stolen from us in 1918.” Sometimes it’s generic: “Time is something we don’t have” or “Just seeing him, just going to concerts with him, and lunch, it was—almost like a drug.”
And yet. A man at The Guardian: “an invented mid-20th century Britain that has the intricate detail and delineation of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, though thankfully described in better prose.” Tolkien invented languages; he filled volumes with the backstory of his world. Dominion has the characters glancing at the TV: a British cooking personality does an episode about making sauerkraut or there’s a program about Morris dancing (fascist cultivation of racial identity). The crack about prose is also out of line. The writing in Dominion is better than bad prose but not as good as good prose. Tolkien outdoes it.
“The chase is exciting and the action thrilling,” we’re told by Literary Review. No. The chase proceeded and the action took place. When on the run, the characters find time to sit on narrow beds and discuss topics (“Everything’s class with you, isn’t it?”). A long coincidence saves one character from death (later he has the grace to reflect on his good luck). Bullets fired by the heroes hit where they have to hit even though it’s night; the villains don’t enjoy nearly as much luck. The downfall of the Third Reich at the end of the book takes place for reasons that have nothing to do with the heroes’ efforts. It’s all kind of boneless.
The book’s author, the late C.J. Sansom, was British and so are the misguided blurbs. Tom Wolfe wrote about the middle-class American couple who felt gratified at hearing their snooty British nanny make a dumbass remark about blacks. Look, they figured, she wasn’t so top-drawer after all. That’s kind of how I feel when reading those quotes. Not so smart after all! “Masterly” (The Independent), “absorbing, thoughtful” (The Times), “gripping and atmospheric” (Lancashire Evening Post), “extraordinary storytelling” (Lancaster Guardian), and wait, here’s a favorite—“builds his nightmare Britain from the sooty bricks of truth” (The Independent again). To which I say, “His wife Clementine’s gone, they found her dead in that stately home in Lancashire last year.”