Dominion
Reviews
DOMINION [is] that rare thing, a book both exciting and thought-provoking.
...a tremendous novel that shakes historical preconceptions while also sending shivers down the spine.
C J Sansom’s masterly new novel of alternative history. Sansom...builds his nightmare Britain from the sooty bricks of truth... every note in Sansom’s smoggy hell rings true. Proper historians tend to treat counter-factual speculation as the crystal meth of their discipline – a cheap high. Novelists, on the other hand, create a parallel reality with every book they write. No surprise then that fiction has outclassed formal history in the imagination of what might have been. ...DOMINION shows us what a truly broken Britain would look, and fell, like. And, as its half-Scottish author makes plain, the blood-and-soil nationalism he most detests would thrive in such a social wasteland... Sansom’s alternative past also seeks to shape our possible futures.
There have been a number of other novels imagining this kind of alternate history ... but Sansom's DOMINION is the most thoroughly imagined in all its ramifications... both as a historical novel and a thriller, DOMINION is absorbing, mordant and written with a passionate persuasiveness... Bravo!
'What the devil is a plot good for but to bring in fine things?' as a 17th-century playwright asked. There are fine things a-plenty here, and the plot unfolds compellingly and gallops along briskly... CJ Sansom has brought off a nice double, writing a good thriller which invites you to ponder the different course history might have taken. His book is also a warning against what he considers to be the virus of nationalism and a reproof to those who believe that no form of fascism could ever take root here.
This is a big novel with traces of a thriller, in which the good are good and the bad are very bad indeed. For readers who enjoy a grown-up adventure story DOMINION is evocative, alarming and richly satisfying.
The chase is exciting and the action thrilling, but the really absorbing part of this excellent book is the detailed creation of a society that could so easily have existed.
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