Books that imagine that history took a different course

THEY MAY not have the cachet of the Pulitzer or the Booker, but the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History deserve respect. The what-if genre of fiction is growing fast, with work of startling quality and originality. Take the last Sidewise long-form winner, “Cahokia Jazz” by Francis Spufford. A noir thriller that takes place in the 1920s, it imagines an America in which the native population had not been nearly wiped out by smallpox. Other winners of the 29-year-old prize include Laurent Binet’s “Civilizations”, which imagines that the Incas invaded Europe in 1531, 39 years after Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas. Tweaking history is surely as much fun as a novelist can have: losers become winners, and not quite everything changes. What if General Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Napoleon had seen off Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo? The Nazis are overrepresented on alternate-history bookshelves as they are in other sections of most libraries. “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth, for example, places Charles Lindbergh, a suspected Nazi sympathiser, in the White House. Not far behind is John F. Kennedy, who skipped that visit to Dallas, or perhaps fell victim to the mafia/Cubans/Russians/Lyndon Johnson. As this selection of the best alternate-history novels demonstrates, the world of imagined pasts is rich and potentially endless.
The Alteration. By Kingsley Amis. New York Review Books; 256 pages; $16.95. Vintage; £9.99
Martin Luther did not lead the Protestant Reformation. Instead, he became pope, and the Roman Catholic church continued to hold sway over all of Europe. That’s the backdrop to “The Alteration”. The action is set in England in 1976 (the year Kingsley Amis’s book was published), but it is an England ruled by a theocratic government and stuck in the Middle Ages. The church has suppressed the scientific revolution, so there is no electricity, horse-drawn carriages share the streets with diesel-powered “omnibuses” and most people live in the countryside. Common folk dress in “brownish tunics and trews” (tight-fitting trousers). Amis softens his implied indictment of Catholicism by allowing that art and architecture flourished. The plot revolves around ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, a chorister with the voice of an angel. Pope John XXIV’s representatives decide he must become a “castrato” (the alteration of the title) so that he will sing for the glory of God in Rome. Hubert flees, taking refuge with a variety of colourful characters in London, setting up a thriller that is infused with Amis’s cutting comic style.
The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington. By Charles Rosenberg. Hanover Square Press; 464 pages; $17.99
The spoilers are apparently right there in the title. In 1780, with the American revolution in full swing, Lord North, Britain’s prime minister, authorises a plot to capture the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington. Special agent Jeremiah Black is charged with sailing to America where, with the help of loyalists, he will kidnap Washington and bring him back to London, to be imprisoned in the Tower and tried for high treason. Charles Rosenberg drew inspiration from rumours that the governor of New York, appointed by the British, really did scheme to capture Washington with the help of his personal armed protection unit, the “Life Guard”. Mr Rosenberg’s novel does not have the high literary merit of Amis’s, but it is a clever reimagining of a tumultuous period in British-American history and a rollicking read. Relish a twist or two at its conclusion.
Resurrection Day. By Brendan DuBois. CreateSpace; 378 pages; $13.99. Little, Brown; £7.99
In October 1962 families gathered around televisions and radios, praying for the news that Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s leader, would solve the Cuban missile crisis. “Resurrection Day” imagines that they failed. A decade later nuclear war has turned the Soviet Union to ashes. The United States has fared better, but has lost New York and Washington. Much of the rest of the country is a wasteland. Aid from Britain and Canada sustains the much reduced American population. Enter Carl Landry, a young reporter for the Boston Globe, who sets out across a blackened landscape to investigate the killing of a veteran of the war in 1962. The murder, he learns, holds the key to revealing a terrifying conspiracy surrounding the missile crisis. “Resurrection Day” mixes genres: detective tale, political thriller, dystopian fiction and alternate history. It’s a white-knuckle ride and a sober reflection on nuclear proliferation. On a vividly imagined post-apocalyptic chessboard Brendan DuBois moves the pieces most convincingly.
Dominion. By C.J. Sansom. Little, Brown; 656 pages; $18.99. Pan Macmillan; £12.99
We could have published an “Economist reads” just on novels that imagine the Nazis had won. It would have included Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”, which posits a German-Japanese carve-up of America. Robert Harris’s “Fatherland”, set in 1964 in Nazi Berlin, would have been another entry. The best is “Dominion”, by C.J. Sansom, who died in 2024. The action takes place in 1952. Britain, governed by appeaser Lord Halifax, surrendered to Germany without firing a shot in May 1940. Now it’s a downtrodden satellite of the Third Reich. Lord Beaverbrook, a newspaper magnate, is prime minister; the fascist Oswald Mosley is home secretary; Winston Churchill leads the resistance from the countryside. Writers critical of the Reich, like J.B. Priestley, E.M. Forster and W.H. Auden, have been erased from history. A giant picture of the Führer hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Like Mr Harris, Sansom packs his reimagined world with evocative details, from London’s “soot stained” brick to the bureaucratese of Whitehall’s nazified civil servants. At its heart “Dominion” is a spy thriller: a civil servant, David Fitzgerald, feeds information to Churchill’s resistance. But there is a larger secret that Fitzgerald and his wife, Sarah, will uncover.
Rodham. By Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House; 464 pages; $18. Transworld; £9.99
Curtis Sittenfeld imagines what might have happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton (pictured), and to American politics, if Hillary and Bill Clinton had broken up in 1975. Hillary becomes a politician and Bill leaves politics and becomes a rich tech entrepreneur. Their paths cross again in startling fashion in 2016, when Donald Trump also makes an appearance. Ms Sittenfeld finds a way to include the Clintons’ famous “60 Minutes” interview in 1992, in which Hillary declared herself to be no Tammy Wynette “standing by my man”. The glamour, the rough and tumble and the sheer grind of American politics are well captured. Above all, Ms Sittenfeld convincingly transports us into Hillary’s inner world. The book’s surprising denouement seems entirely plausible.
Also try
We recommended five novels that imagine a dictatorship in America, some of which revise the past. In 2017 we warned that the what-if-the-Nazis-had-won genre may distract from more credible threats to democracy. Our series “The World If” has speculated about the future and invented history.