The Churchill Memorandum [Paperback]

This is an entertaining, well-written example of the genre of invented history; indeed, such are the myriad references to events and individuals scattered throughout the text that it would take a very well-informed reader indeed not to see this as a refresher course on some of the currents that have influenced the course of twentieth-century history.

However, this is not to take away from the overall appeal of the novel as a pacy thriller with more than a nod to antecedence in Buchan and indeed some similarities with the techniques of William Boyd's "Any Human Heart". There is plenty of suspense, some appropriate savagery, and an underlying preoccupation with ideas and the capacity of the individual to bring about their influence. Throughout, characters play with themes of control and lack of control, wrestling with a posterity that is seen through the dual perspectives of the characters' actions and the reader's awareness of actual events. The whole work would make for an effective, if challenging, screenplay.

This book is a rattling good yarn, in the tradition of "Sapper", the creator of Bulldog Drummond, and the books of John Buchan, which featured another British Imperial hero, Richard Hannay. The central character in the Churchill Memorandum is also a kind of British Imperial hero, since Dr. Andrew Marchant, as he is called, has an English father and an Indian mother and sets out patriotically to defend the Empire through thick and thin. However, as befits the setting of the story in a parallel historical account of a late-stage period of the collapsing Empire, the hero created by Sean Gabb is anything but heroic, unless you count his amazing ability to survive terrible privations. In the course of his exploits, Marchant is shot at, chased by helicopter, drugged, buggered (this bit happens off-stage, by the way) and almost dissolved in a bath of acid and somehow manages to emerge unscathed. He keeps in physical and moral shape, not by training on the rugby field or in an Army boxing ring (as his predecessors would have), but thanks to an unshakeable faith is his own intellectual rectitude. He really is the most obnoxious little turd, who argues the toss with his chief adversaries, who are also the chief villains in the plot, namely Harold Macmillan and Michael Foot. But they, also in the tradition of master criminals down the ages, don't strangle, shoot or bludgeon the little git to death on the spot, but promise to do it later, thereby leaving our hero with a chance to escape and cause more trouble.

Churchill's part in all this, by the time the events described are taking place, is as a dead, neglected British politician, who was never called on by his countrymen to lead them to victory, because there never was a Second World War. He did however take some notes at a secret meeting between leaders of the Great Powers and this memorandum apparently has the power to destroy the diplomatic equilibrium between the British, German and Japanese Empires, not to mention the settlement between the British Empire and United States. Rather like Agatha Christie's murderous bourgeois, who would gaily bump each other off, for fear of being exposed as frauds and bounders, Gabb's evil politicians, with all the power of an unaccountable State at their disposal, seem unduly worried about their possible exposure as double-dealers. To whom would this revelation have come as a surprise? But that would have knocked away the main pillar of the plot.

The advantage in writing parallel history, from an author's point of view, is that, once you have departed from the actual course of events, in this case at the death of Adolf Hitler in a traffic accident, from then on you are free to retain, reschedule or reject other historical events, and to tease your readers in the process. The reader is inclined to jump up and say "that wasn't when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened" or "Stalin didn't die then", and then realises that this is, after all, parallel history.

But even in parallel histories there are limits to the reader's forbearance. OK, Harold Macmillan is a devious, but urbane schemer; Stalin is succeeded by Lavrenti Beria; Enoch Powell is the Secretary of State for India. These are all quite plausible appointments. But Michael Foot as the insanely murderous leader of British Communist Party. Do us a favour! Foot would have had three major disqualifications, certainly in the eyes of Comrade Beria: he was an intellectual, he was a man of (possibly misguided) principle and he had a sense of humour. There were plenty of other candidates for the British job: the actual office-holders, such as the gruesomely humourless John Gollan or Gordon McLennan, or maybe one of the Communist Biologists of the time, either J.D. Bernal or J.B.S. Haldane. More fundamentally, at the very point of historical bifurcation, an avuncular, peace-loving Hermann Goering would have been an unlikely successor to Hitler. Rheinhard Heydrich was already waiting in the wings to succeed Hitler, wouldn't have stayed in Prague to be shot at and would have pursued Hitler's Aryan vision with rather more determination than the Führer himself.

But these are quibbles, that serve to keep the readers on their toes. This one kept turning the pages, hoping that yet another historical figure would put in a cameo performance, as did a plausibly craven Edward Heath, Robin Day, an incomprehensible Nicholas Kaldor and, as kind of in-house joke for Gabb's core readership, both Ludwig van Mises and Friedrich von Hayek with major responsibilities in the enlightened German government. Sadly by 1959 in this parallel universe, Spike Milligan had not yet made it to Poet Laureate, nor had Harry Worth been appointed as Vice-Chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Herne Bay.

I finished The Churchill Memorandum at half past one this morning as I was waiting for my Mises Academy lecturer to take to my vid-screen to teach me about Rothbardian factor pricing..

A jolly good read all told. I started it yesterday morning at seven o'clock and didn't put it down in between (how do you say "a real page turner" on a Kindle version I wonder?). I particularly noted, and liked, the frequent use of the construct "except I was..." instead of the more vulgar "except that/when/if I was..."

I was a little disappointed that the Michael Foot character killed Harold Macmillan's young catamite before the young protagonist Anthony Markham got any bedding action with him, but there we go, that made it all the more tragic. You would have to alter that a little for the TV adaption though I'm sure - you can't have two young homosexual heroes like that nowadays without at least one bed scene, even before the waterfall. Though perhaps the mere depiction of any such event with a minor these days woudl fall foul of laws that could have come straight out of Harry Anslinger's dystopian alternative America.

I can remember my grandmother having the same dire opinion of Indian food (my grandfather had a similar reaction to sweet-corn: "bird food"). My grandmother, sadly, no longer remembers that, or anything else. Which is just as well since her Greenock nursing home is now run by Indians and only allows mince and tatties once a week to conform to state enforced dietary diversity, on the day they take all the inmates' denture sets for cleaning.

The image of Pea-cock Tynan entertaining himself, however, is one that will linger in my mind for a long time I fear, and may have been gratuitous.

It's an interesting genre. I'm not entirely happy that most libertarian fiction takes the "easy" route of inventing new galaxies and species - which makes them somewhat depressing to think that we're going to have to wait another couple of millennia and contact with a more enlightened unearthly civilisation to see freedom in our sector of the universe. The way in which Sean Gabb shows that great advances could be made in just a few years if we adopted common sense is much more heartening.

Gabb has got it just right. For all that some other reviewers (notably those who now live under something immeasurably worse than the Anslinger government you portrayed for them) don't recognise some of the names (Wikipedia is your friend appeared to be a common theme), I feel that alternative histories diverging from a point in time many readers will vaguely remember is more effective than those that diverge before "living memory". Near future predictive stories are popular now, but don't have the benefit of being something you can compare with actual events, and stand to lose their appeal once the time they predict has passed.

Is there any prospect of it becoming a series, based perhaps around Markham, Pakeshi and Stanhope as an alternative intelligence agency under Powell as "M", I wonder?