The Zilov Bombs: by D.G. Barron

D.G. Barron's novel of Soviet-occupied Britain was first published by Andre Deutsch in 1962 and then by Pan in paperback in 1965. It has never been subsequently reprinted, perhaps because it falls into an uneasy territory between genre and literary fiction. The book demonstrably fails at both, but its charm is that it never really tries to be either - it is pure headturning pulp, and it is most amusing that the book's cover reviews are quotes from such quaint periodicals as Woman's Journal, Topic and The Listener. Of course, these are the good reviews - I have no idea what the Times Literary Supplement had to say about it, or Analog. If anything.

Following the ban the bomb demonstrations of the late 1950s, governments across Europe opt for nuclear disarmament, hoping the Soviets will reciprocate and withdraw their nuclear deterrent from their satellite states. Instead the Soviets simply roll across Europe, conquering former NATO countries and transforming them into People's Republics. In subjugated Britain, Guy Elliot, former writer and ex-peace campaigner, is now an agricultural commissar, slowly forcing the new rules of collectivisation on reluctant farmers in Norfolk. Guy is also involved with the resistance in a small way, much to the chagrin of his wife, who would rather he did not place them or their two children in danger. One night, while doing his rounds on a country road, Guy is witness to the theft a Soviet lorry and the murder of its driver - he then discovers the lorry carried several limited nuclear weapons, and that these have been hidden on a nearby farm. Guy informs the resistance and is then drafted into securing these bombs for use by the resistance in a country-wide rebellion. The bombs are secured, at great cost; so great, in fact, that Guy wants out. But it is too late - the Soviets have identified him as a key figure, rather than the minor player he so reluctantly allowed himself to become. He turns back to the resistance for help, but they simply make him their prisoner - because he is in possession of valuable information. A sensible enough precaution as it turns out - Elliott is well-remembered as one of those ban the bomb "traitors" who forced Britain to relinquish its deterrent in the first place. Now in a position to hear the plans of the resistance for a rebellion, he is horrified at the prospective loss of life. Sadly, at this point, the book degenerates into a straight will he/won't he thriller, with an unsatisfactory denouement.

Despite its faults The Zilov Bombs is a better than expected novel. It is obviously an anti-peacenik tract and the moral choices set up throughout the novel illustrate the author's intent, all the way to Elliott's final, explosive moments. Still, the characters are often well-drawn, the arguments both for and against are allowed to be made, and the Americans are kept out of it. So too, curiously, are the Russians - it is an all-English affair. And this perhaps is how the novel is so affecting - everyone resists in their own way, from Elliott's boss, who wants to sabotage collective farms by slowing their introduction, to the senior civil servants who find the ultimate use for the Zilov Bombs. It is not a novel about invasion - it is rather a peon to tradition, to the implacable management of British society, which can ameliorate the shock of ideology by simply absorbing it into a class system that looks and feels as solid as landscape.

The cover price states 2/6 - I'm not sure how much that is in roubles, or in new money.

A Wild Justice: by Francis Clifford

Sometimes the purpose of our cultural custodians is to award posterity to their darlings; we are given a steady stream of articles, reprints and documentaries about, say, Le Carre, or Graham Greene, etc; however, those authors not read by our custodians are designated forgotten and hence their cultural impact is nil. This, of course, is a vicious circle, because if books go out of print and living memory is finite, then the works of certain authors might as well not exist at all. Despite this widespread cultural censorship, ghosts do appear, but our custodians do not have the sensibilities to see them; rather it is left to genre readers to communicate with the out of print.

Francis Clifford was the author of many excellent thrillers which sold well over three decades. Two were adapted into films; one (The Naked Runner) starring Frank Sinatra, no less, was passably good; the other, Act of Mercy, was filmed as Guns of Darkness, quite ineffectively, as the recent Network DVD release allowed me to discover. For the most part Clifford's cold war thrillers are his best; these are always complicated by a unique form of suspense in which the act of page-turning is almost a victimless crime. There are also several Nazi-hunting thrillers, and a wonderful little book called The Third Side of the Coin, in which a desk clerk at a British airport steals a suitcase full of money and flies to Spain, where he is apprehended by an earthquake. There are three war novels, the best of which, Honour the Shrine, is probably the most moving war story out of the Far East that I have ever read.

Clifford had several Irish connections in his personal life which led him to write two Irish-themed books. Drummer in the Dark and A Wild Justice. The former is poor by his usual standards, but the latter, with a little tweaking, is a remarkable book altogether. The action of A Wild Justice takes place in the ruins of an Irish city; the city is unnamed, as is the battle by which it has been destroyed - we are left simply to assume there has been another rising, though which rising and by whom are not specified. The survivors seek a means of escape through a maze of half-collapsed houses, factories and shops, while the army routinely bomb the ruins to prevent any escape. Within these once lived-in shells another kind of life takes place, a desperate struggle for survival that encompasses the full range of human cruelty, from murder to rape; and beyond this is the ultimate Irish crime - betrayal, the advent of which turns freedom fighters to terrorists. It is sometimes remarked that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but when both share a cellar with only one exit the distinction is most brutal. Of course there is no real resolution except tragedy; the surviving rebels are doomed, and as their cause is broken down to emotional rubble, so they seek to play dead therein.

The troubles did not throw up many successful Irish thrillers; most were a mix of propaganda and/or special pleading. To my mind the best of them was probably Benedict Kiely's Proxopera. A Wild Justice matches Kiely's novel in power and brevity and is greatly helped along by its anonymity of venue, an idea I would have taken a lot further. Because the sheer scale of destruction wrought in Clifford's novel goes well beyond anything experienced during the troubles - rather the book reads like an alternate history in which a civil war is fought and lost by those who wargamed it to death.

The Foundations of the Twenty-First Century: by Philip Challinor

The year is 1989. The place is London. But the event... the event is the centenary of Hitler's birth, and it is being celebrated by Britain; not simply Nazi-occupied Britain, but a country almost fully integrated into Germany's Third Reich, embedded, as it were. The Royal Family still survives, suggesting an all-too familiar treachery; there are references to Isolationists gaining influence at the beginning of World War Two; the Russian front appears to be ongoing and claiming the life of many a British Volk soldier; and there is mention of America escaping the fate of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Foreign tourists abound in London for the centenary, and all appears well on the Home Front.

Harold Cullen is part of a group of cadets who arrive in London to begin their courses and are seconded to assist with centenary duties, amongst other things - for in Nazi Britain the officious attitude of the stern corporal is king, and as punishment for youth and lack of rank, the group finds itself detailed to hand out leaflets, while billeted in a dreary but surprisingly large flat. The cadets are a mixed bag - while they are all keen to hone their Nationalist-Socialist zeal, Cullen seems particularly adept - for example, happily spying on fellow train passengers on the journey to London. Not content with this, he is also keen to explore the personal belongings of their landlord, whose flat seems rather more spacious than Cullen deems fit for a single man living alone. The landlord, Truman, well aware of what motivates the likes of Cullen, lets slips that his accommodation is reward for a special service performed for the Reich years before. But he remains tight-lipped about details, and this only furthers Cullen's curiosity. Perhaps Cullen's zeal can only be attributed to the fact that his grandfather also performed special service for the Reich, of which he is always mindful, chiefly because he is never allowed to forget it - not by his mother, his instructors, or by the other cadets - the exact nature of that service, however, is never shared with him.

The book takes the form of a first person narrative by Cullen, perhaps a journal of some kind, because each entry is dated. The prose throughout is terse, succinct and, at times, a little conspiratorial. All the pettiness of life in Britain is combined with the perversity of Nazism, and they are found to be compatible, collaborators, familiars even. The language reflects this in turn of phrase and figure of speech - phrases are jackbooted through the text as slogans (blood always tells), figures are uniform and correct. It captures ideology not only as a way of life, but as a mode of self-censoring forethought - as interior life. However, Cullen's narrative gives the impression of being a little too correct - at least at first. He has an eye for the disloyal; but he also has a disarming eye for the loyal. He sees and reports contradictions, anomalies, pettiness and even ideological doubts, all of which take various forms; and his crisis, when it comes, is an almost willfully perverse and unwelcome development in his career. It is as though we are not the only people looking over his shoulder.

Up to this point, there appears to be almost no resistance, except perhaps in one regard: the near-forbidden knowledge of another event, uncelebrated but seemingly unforgotten, and which can be pieced together from clues and hints scattered throughout the text, variously as allusions, threats, boasts and anecdotes. Who, for example, are the mysterious "hoaxers" hiding in plain sight on the London Underground? Just what was the supreme service rendered by Cullen's landlord to the state?  Even the early reference to trains running on time assumes ominous significance, once the reader has pieced together the subtext. Usually, in alternative history, authors game their point of departure - it is built into the text as a twist or a hook. But here, no such point of departure matters, and there are no safe games to be had from a reveal. If anything, history and its alternate converge in the opposite of foregrounding - as a defining back shadow which haunts the text. F21C transports its themes by more than train of thought: the final, almost hallucinatory journey is anything but that - it is the culmination of everything we have seen and heard: in Cullen's history, and in ours.

As for resistance, in a way Mr Challinor performs a remarkable feat: in a book which so cleverly transports the reader, the thought occurs - if history is written by the winner, who writes the alternate history? The dissident perhaps.

Tomorrow's Men: by Michael Shea

In the near future Britain has descended into chaos and civil war. There is government, of a kind, attempting to police the violence as the ideological struggle between left and right is finally played out on the streets with bombs and guns. The US, ever mindful of Britain's strategic position on the edge of Europe, despatches special envoy Max Gregory, ex-Brit and head of distinguished think-tank, the Gregory Institute, to act as American adviser to a weakened Prime Minister, with hopes he may eventually become Pro-Consul. Gregory has a hard time in Britain - he cannot even meet with the leaders of the various factions, much less negotiate with them. All factions seem to be under the spell of retaliatory violence. Gregory falls in with maverick reporter Dan Lateman, who feeds him conspiracy theories which seem curiously prescient - it appears that once espionage reaches a certain pitch, all investigative journalism becomes a conspiracy theory. Together they acquire evidence that much of the violence on the streets is not that of left and right factions, but is rather the false flag operation of a third party. Gregory at first suspects the Soviet Union, but through his institute acquires further evidence that the culprit is in fact the US, in the form of a leaked CIA report into North Sea oil capacity, which is much greater than previously thought. Britain is suddenly the most oil-rich nation outside of the Gulf states. As both an American envoy and ex-Brit, Gregory's loyalties are torn - until the US State Department decides he knows too much and is now expendable, as are his loved ones. And so the emergent neo-con policies usually reserved for the far-flung are to be played out to their conclusion in Britain - unless Gregory and Lateman can find a way to expose the false flag operations to the factions of left and right, and unite them under the old, old banner - my enemy's enemy is my friend...

Tomorrow's Men is a very bleak, if satisfying, novel. It is fascinating to compare its plot to the tragedies currently playing out in the Middle-East, and Shea's extrapolations from US Cold War operations in the 70s are well-judged, especially in his view that Airstrip One is a very expendable part of the American empire and would face the full force of black ops and scorched earth if required. It is not that it is an overtly anti-American novel - it simply puts Britain in the firing line and takes it from there. The end of the novel is suitably distressing and reminds me greatly of the early 80s BBC TV series, Spyship.

Tomorrow's Men was first published in 1982 by Weidenfield and Nicholson. I'm not sure whether it had a paperback imprint immediately following that, but it seems to have been reprinted in 2001 under the title Breaking Point. Shea's earlier novels were written under the pen-name of Michael Sinclair - Tomorrow's Men was the first novel he chose to publish under his own name. It is difficult to see why he made this decision, unless as some kind of statement - because his day-job was as no less than Press Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. In 1986 Shea became embroiled in a minor controversy when a leak from the Palace suggested that the Queen was 'dismayed' by Margaret Thatcher's divisive social policies. After a brief investigation, the source of the leak was traced to Shea, and he left the Queen's service the following year - the two events are said not to be connected. It is ironic that the controversy centred around the source of the leak rather than the veracity of its content - considering her conspicuous silence at the nation-shattering actions of Britain's current coalition, I'm sure that HMQ does not give a flying fuck about divisive social policies. It is my own theory, having read Tomorrow's Men, that Shea was a man of conscience (and a Scot to boot) and that he struck at Thatcher's regime with the only weapon he had in his possession - headed notepaper.