Dominion

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Approximately 2/3 into the novel it shifts pace and becomes moves from being a political thriller to the style of a more traditional spy thriller. We are, of course, in past futures, a foreign country which did things differently; we are in the country of C. I admire his talent for writing fight sequences and action scenes because I, myself, find it difficult and I think it's hard for someone to make it realistic and believable.

You do not have to read between the lines to fish out the meaning of what is going on at any point in the book, it is all made so blatantly obvious. It’s perfectly true, in a world of limitless possibilities, that Samson’s alternate is just as valid as any other alternate, but does it stand up to scrutiny? It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. Dominion is based on a bogus historical premise; it’s based on the character assassination of real people. In a fit of camaraderie, Frank reveals the secret to David who is trying to get Frank off to America with the help of other resistance workers.

In the end Frank takes himself and the ‘dreadful secret’ into oblivion, an action, if taken earlier, that would have saved several hundred wearisome pages. After Frank's brother told him, Frank pushed him out of a first story window and ended up in an asylum.

So, for example, in Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the second world war extends to 1947, while for Deighton it ends in 1941. He befriends another lady in the same department, and surreptitiously obtains her key to the secret cabinet.

Allan Massie for The Daily Telegraph, however, defended the portrayal by arguing that "in the make-believe world of counter-factual history, a novelist is entitled to take a different line" and that having a younger version of Powell be as such was "not inherently improbable. The uncanny ability Sansom has to tell such a vivid story of Geoff Drax and his emotions and troubles through the eyes of his friends and enemies amazes me. In the universe of this novel, we made peace with Germany in 1940 and the Facist regime has been our ally for the past 15 years or so. And in a Birmingham mental hospital an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle for ever.