Tag: Alternative history

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It has happened here

 

© Renard Press

 

Nowadays, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) feels like a story of alternative history, exploring what would have happened in the USA if the historical timeline had taken a twist in the mid-1930s it didn’t actually take.  But when Lewis wrote it, the real timeline and his imaginary one were in the future.  He was peeking ahead to the presidential election of 1936, one year after his novel’s publication, and wondering, “What if…?”  In its original context, then, It Can’t Happen Here was a work of science fiction, though the future imagined was so barely ahead of the present that it probably didn’t seem like that.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that reading the book in the middle of 2025, with the USA sliding remorselessly towards authoritarianism under the presidency of Donald Trump, It Can’t Happen Here doesn’t feel dated.  No, it’s surely more relevant than ever.

 

The novel explores what could have happened if the 1936 election hadn’t been won by Franklin D. Roosevelt – who in fact won it resoundingly, garnering over 60 percent of the popular vote and securing over 98 percent of the electoral college.  In Lewis’s version of events, the presidency is won by a populist maverick called Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip.  It’s commonly assumed Lewis based Windrip on the controversial Louisiana governor and US Senate member Huey Long.  In an ironic twist of fate, Long was assassinated one month before It Can’t Happen Here was published.  The son-in-law of a political rival shot him, though it’s been claimed Long actually died of a wound from a ricocheting bullet fired by one of his trigger-happy bodyguards, who immediately responded to the attacker by pumping him ‘full of lead’.

 

Early on in It Can’t Happen Here, we get to read Buzz Windrip’s campaign manifesto, The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.  This is a grab-bag of crowd-pleasing promises – the government giving every family 5000 dollars a year (point 11) while wealth being capped at 3,000,000 dollars per person (point 5) – and nakedly racist, reactionary and jingoistic rhetoric.  You have to swear allegiance to the New Testament and the flag if you want a job in the professions (point 4), threats are made against the Jews (point 9) and blacks and women are disenfranchised (points 10 and 12 respectively).  Oh, and there’s a sneaky final point, number 15, wherein Congress and the Supreme Court have to cede all authority to the Presidency.

 

The manifesto is popular enough to put Windrip in the White House and, thereafter, the USA experiences a rapid fascist takeover similar to the one Hitler engineered in Germany in 1933-34.  Windrip soon has his own militia / secret police making sure everyone toes the line, media, educational and economic institutions are bullied into acquiescence, and opponents, dissenters and anyone else the regime takes a dislike to are herded into concentration camps – that’s what the novel calls them, several years before the Nazis made the term ‘concentration camp’ synonymous with evil on an industrial scale.

 

The country’s lurch into dystopia is seen through the eyes of Doremus Jessop, a 60-year-old, liberal-minded editor of a smalltown newspaper in Vermont.  Jessop finds out the hard way that the new regime doesn’t take kindly to criticism – he pens a scathing editorial, which leads to an altercation with some officials, which results in his son-in-law being executed.  Afterwards, he’s forced to do an about-turn with his paper’s editorials and news coverage and make it a propaganda mouthpiece for Windrip and his government, as every other official news outlet in America had become.

 

Later, a disgusted and horrified Doremus hooks up with a resistance movement, the New Underground, run by a dissident senator called Walt Trowbridge who’s escaped to and based himself in Canada, and he begins surreptitiously writing and distributing an anti-Windrip newsletter called The Vermont Vigilance.  Later still, Doremus and his associates are rumbled and they wind up in a concentration camp.  But the story isn’t quite over yet for the dogged old editor…

 

© Penguin Books

 

As I said earlier, when you read It Can’t Happen Here today, there’s an elephant in the room – a corrupt, authoritarian, orange-skinned elephant, one with a bad combover, a ludicrously long red tie, a big mouth, a small pair of hands, a tiny but cunning brain, a criminal record, and a penchant for cheating at golf.  Yes, it’s shocking how much Lewis’s novel anticipates what Trump is up to in America at the moment.

 

As with Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which is now better funded than most countries’ armies and is no doubt attracting into its ranks all sorts of far-right nutjobs, Windrip sets up a militia called the Minute Men (MMs) and recruits into it thugs and low-life who relish having the power to intimidate, bully, beat up and murder their neighbors.  Doremus’s life gets progressively harder as Shad Ledue – his former handyman, who’s a lazy, ignorant brute and who lusts after his youngest daughter – joins the local Minute Men and, gradually, shins his way up the pole until he becomes District Commissioner.  And Trump’s enthusiasm for creating ‘immigration detention facilities’, like the notorious ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida, mirrors Windrip’s enthusiasm for creating concentration camps, like the one Doremus latterly finds himself an inmate of.

 

It Can’t Happen Here makes much of the regime’s assault on academia.  Early on, Doremus receives a worried letter from an acquaintance at his old alma mater, Isiah College, warning about how its Board of Trustees is bending to Windrip’s malevolent will.  “What,” he asks, “can we do with such fast exploding fascism?”  Trump has famously tried to do the same with America’s universities – some, like Columbia University, groveling to him pathetically; others, like Harvard, putting up slightly more of a fight.

 

Windrip sees to it that the ‘most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”  Trump, of course, has made sure that the present-day Supreme Court is packed with yes-men and yes-women.

 

And in an effort to bolster its authority, Windrip’s regime launches an operation to end ‘all crime in America forever’.  Criminals are “tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent… and two in ten taken in the MMs as inspectors.”  That sounds suspiciously like Trump’s recent takeover of Washington D.C., supposedly in the name of ridding the capital city’s streets of crime, though more likely to divert attention from the possibility that Trump’s name appears in the US Justice Department’s files investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Generally, Lewis’s descriptions of how Windrip manages to captivate the American public, or a section of it sufficiently large to get him into power, are depressingly similar to how Trump weaves a spell over his ‘MAGA faithful’ – portraying himself as an outsider and anti-establishment figure, despite the fact he’s the son of a real-estate millionaire and has had everything handed to him on a plate.  Of Windrip, Lewis says: “…he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering above them, and they raised their hands to him in worship.”

 

Meanwhile, Lewis highlights how the regime puts in positions of authority people who are worthless but unswervingly loyal to Windrip.  That loyalty, of course, rewards them with wealth, power and prestige.  Trump too has populated his government with sycophantic mediocrities, self-serving grifters and dangerous incompetents like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio.  Their single virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is their ceaseless willingness to bow, scrape and debase themselves before him.

 

There’s even a parallel with Elon Musk who, as the world’s richest man and CEO of the social-media platform X, has a massive ability to inform and misinform people and shape their opinions.  The It Can’t Happen Here version of Musk is Bishop Paul Peter Prang, a priest who makes a hugely popular and influential weekly address on the radio.  Like Musk’s voice on social media, Prang’s voice ‘circled the world at 186,000 miles a second’ and practically ‘leapt to the farthest stars.’  (Prang’s character was inspired by a real-life demagogue, the ‘Radio Priest’ Charles Coughlin.)  And like Musk with Trump, Prang enthusiastically backs Windrip for president – but gets short shrift from the man he’s championed once he’s across the threshold of the White House.  Though while Trump merely dropped and humiliated Musk, Windrip sticks Prang in jail and then in an ‘insane asylum’: “No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.”

 

All that said, It Can’t Happen Here is not a perfect book.  It has certain features that earn it the dreaded sobriquet ‘of its time’.  The focus is almost entirely on a handful of comfortably well-off white Americans and, though there are brief references to the horrors Windrip visits upon the black community, the book shows no interest in exploring these.  Also, Lewis makes mocking references to sexuality of Lee Sarason, Windrip’s Machiavellian campaign manager, who wears ‘violet silk pajamas’ and obviously has a fondness for strapping young men.  But no mention is made of the regime’s official policy towards homosexuals, which presumably would have been as murderous as Nazi Germany’s.  And male chauvinists will appreciate how Doremus gets to have his cake and eat it throughout the book, in that he’s simultaneously married to one woman, dull, frumpy Emma, and engaged in an affair with another, the bewitching firebrand Lorinda.  He’s never taken to task for this.

 

And the book’s tone can be awkward at times.  Lewis writes it in a folksy, sardonic, Mark Twain-like style that sometimes works, especially when its poking fun at the general hypocrisies, absurdities and idiocies of Windrip’s regime.  It works less well when it’s detailing the brutal realities of that regime – the tortures and humiliations, for instance, that Doremus has to endure while he’s in a concentration camp.  For subject-matter as bleak as this, I suspect the only way to record it is with the precise and dispassionate prose of, say, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

 

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here may not quite make it into the top tier of great dystopian novels, then.  However, in 2025, you’re unlikely to read one that feels more terrifyingly prescient.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Touring Club Italiano

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It could have happened here

 

© Triad Granada

 

Recently, I’ve read a couple of ‘alternative history’ novels that imagine different realities in the 1930s and 1940s: wherein Britain and the USA were taken over by fascism just as Germany and Italy were.  What could have induced me, in 2025, to read novels about Britain and the USA succumbing to fascism?  I really can’t imagine.  Here are my thoughts on one of those books, Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978).

 

Deighton is best known as the author of The IPCRESS File (1962), the book that introduced the world to Harry Palmer, a down-at-heels spy whose humdrum experiences are a corrective to the glamorous espionage fantasy-world inhabited by Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

 

Actually, that description does both Deighton and Fleming a disservice.  Harry Palmer isn’t even the name of the protagonist in The IPCRESS File.  Deighton keeps its first-person narrator anonymous.  The name was only devised for the character in 1965 when the book was made into a film with the non-capitalised title The Ipcress File, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Michael Caine.  Also, while the film version is determinedly unexotic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, restricts its action to a non-swinging 1960s London, Deighton’s novel is more expansive.  It allows its hero to do some properly exciting, Bondian things, such as participate in a rescue mission in Beirut and visit an American neutron-bomb test site in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Meanwhile, Fleming’s novels certainly featured exotic locations (the Caribbean, the Swiss Alps, the French coast), exotic activities (scuba diving, skiing, gambling in casinos) and exotic food and drink (caviar, stone crabs, Dom Pérignon champagne), which no doubt tantalised his readers, many of whom were living in drab, austere, post-war Britain and eating such rationing-era fare as pig’s trotters, spam and lardy cake.  But he invested at least some of those novels with a little grit and realism too.  However, just as the medium of film made Harry Palmer more lowkey than the literary original, so a series of over-the-top movies unanchored the character of Bond and floated him off into the realms of total fantasy.  Ironically, the Harry Palmer movies and the first nine Bond movies shared the same producer, Harry Saltzman.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Film Distributors

 

I was reminded of this dichotomy when reading SS-GB because, while its hero inhabits a grey, downbeat world, where dealing with even the simplest details of everyday life can be exhausting, some big, almost Bondian things hove into view and require his attention.  These, though, hardly make his existence any more glamorous.  Rather, they make it a lot harder for him than it was already.

 

In Deighton’s imagined alternative universe, SS-GB begins in November 1941.  Nine months earlier, in February, Britain surrendered to Germany.  February 1941 was four months before, in real history, Hitler turned against Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, an event that in in SS-GB evidently didn’t happen because the novel depicts Germany and the Soviet Union as, still, firm allies.  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, which drew the USA into the war against the Axis powers, occurred at the end of 1941 and hasn’t happened yet.  One wonders if, here, it will happen, given the alterations elsewhere on the timeline.  The USA remains neutral in SS-GB, whilst peering across the Atlantic at a fully Nazi-controlled Europe with wariness and trepidation.  Incidentally, Deighton provides almost no exposition about what has gone on and it’s left to the reader to infer.

 

SS-GB’s hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, is a policeman at Scotland Yard who finds himself having to do his police-work under the supervision of the German occupiers.  His immediate superior is General – ‘or, more accurately in SS parlance, Gruppenführer’ – Fritz Kellerman: “a genial-looking man in his late fifties… of medium height but his enthusiasm for food and drink provided a rubicund complexion and a slight plumpness…”  Obviously, it was never put to the test, but Kellerman represents a good guess on Deighton’s part about how many German officials would have behaved if they had been posted to a defeated Britain and put in power there.   They’d have behaved like amiable Anglophiles, dressing in tweed suits, going hunting and fishing on country estates, playing golf, guzzling Scotch whisky and stocking their rooms with British antiques.  (Deighton has fun developing that last idea.  He depicts a bunch of 1940s British spivs running an illicit trade in British heirlooms, aimed at the German occupiers.)

 

Archer fits neatly into those Germans’ image of Britain because he represents another cosy and much-loved British cliché: the famous sleuthing detective.  Recognising him, one occupier exclaims, “You’re Archer of the Yard… You’re the detective who solved the Bethnal Green Poisonings and caught ‘the Rottingdean Ripper’ back before the war.”  Later in the book, Archer plays up his fame among the Germans – at least, the ones who enjoy true-life crime stories – to his advantage.

 

Behind the bonhomie of the likes of Kellerman, however, lurks the despotic ruthlessness of Nazi Germany.  Early on, Kellerman warns Archer about what may be coming.  Of Scotland Yard, he says, “Neither of us want political advisors in this building, Superintendent.  Inevitably, the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.”

 

The story begins with Archer assigned to what looks like a straightforward murder case, a shooting in a rundown neighbourhood called Shepherd Market.  The murder scene is a flat “crammed with whisky, coffee, tea and so on, and Luftwaffe petrol coupons lying around on the table.  The victim is a well-dressed man, probably a black-marketeer.”  Of course, Archer gradually realises there’s more to the case than initially meets the eye.  And, as he grapples with the increasingly serious implications of what he’s investigating, he encounters a variety of characters who may be on his side or may be out to get him.

 

These include an officer in the SS’s intelligence service, an intense and driven man called Oskar Huth, who’s flown in from Berlin and put in charge of Archer and his investigation, and who’s the antithesis of the jocular Kellerman.  When Archer meets him off his Lufthansa plane and inquires where his bags are, he snaps, “Shotguns, golf-clubs and fishing tackle, you mean?  I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense.”  Constituting the one glamorous element that enters Archer’s life during the book is Barbara Barqa, a foxy American journalist who’s been allowed into London by the press attaché of the German Embassy in Washington.  She unexpectedly turns up at the murder scene and, predictably, isn’t all that she seems.  Meanwhile, additional tension comes from Archer’s elderly sergeant, and mentor, Harry Woods.  He’s a man ‘who fought and won in the filth of Flanders’ and ‘would never come to terms with defeat.’  It’s whispered that he has connections with the British Resistance movement, which makes Archer’s position very precarious.

 

As Archer’s investigation continues, I was, initially, a little disappointed by two of the main plot devices that Deighton uses.  These devices seemed to me slightly obvious ones for an alternative-history / World War II novel set in early-1940s London.  One is the race by various countries to develop a game-changing weapon – guess which weapon that is.  Indeed, when Archer learns that the murder-victim was suffering from radiation poisoning, I was reminded of Troy Kennedy Martin’s masterly TV miniseries Edge of Darkness (1985), which had a policeman investigating a killing and finding himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy involving the nuclear industry.  The other plot device is an operation to rescue an important personage whom the Germans have imprisoned in the Tower of London.  If the rescue is successful, it’ll be a boost for Britain’s battered morale and a propaganda win for the British Resistance.  Again, guess who that personage is.

 

To be fair, Deighton keeps both plot devices grounded. They’re wrapped in believably authentic realpolitik involving the neutral Americans, different elements in the British Resistance, and competing factions among the occupying Germans.  And the way one of them is resolved, near the end, caused me genuine surprise.  Also, there’s a subplot involving Karl Marx – whose remains are buried at London’s Highgate Cemetery – that I thought Deighton handled ingeniously.

 

But what really makes SS-GB a pleasure are Deighton’s descriptions of everyday life in occupied London – and what the ordinary population, war-weary, demoralised and living near the breadline, have to put up with.  There’s ‘the green, sooty fog’ with its ‘ugly smell’, which doesn’t quite hide ‘advertisement hoardings, upon which appeals for volunteers to work in German factories, announcements about rationings and a freshly pasted German-Soviet Friendship Week poster shone rain-wet.’  There’s Archer’s landlady, whose soldier-husband is in ‘a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.’  She serves her policeman lodger eggs she got from a neighbour as payment for an ‘old grey sweater to unravel for the wool’, and a cube of margarine, ‘the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers.’

 

And there’s a rather desperate-sounding gala evening at the Metropolitan Music Hall.  This ends with the cast trying to cheer up the dejected London audience by ‘throwing paper streamers, wearing funny hats and popping balloons that descended from a great wire basket suspended from the ceiling’ – leaving the theatre ‘in a chaos of litter that had to be salvaged for re-use.’  The line-up for the evening includes Gracie Fields and Flanagan and Allen.  No George Formby, though.  Probably he’s in a prison camp, as a punishment for punching Hitler in his 1940 movie Let George Do It! 

 

And there are the ruins and wreckage left both by the Blitz and by Deighton’s imagined German invasion.  It’s a grey, wet, cold, blasted place, full of dejected and frustrated people, and it isn’t difficult to envision the London of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) being a little further along the road.  Deighton, who’s still with us at the venerable age of 96, was ten years old when World War II broke out, and he came from the Marylebone area of London.  Presumably, he had images of the city in wartime seared into his memory and didn’t have to stretch his imagination too much to describe SS-GB’s version of it.

 

Thus, SS-GB’s crowning achievement is a depiction of Nazi-controlled London, and Britain, that you can practically see, hear, feel, smell and taste.  Though of course, you really wouldn’t have wanted to.

 

© Harper Collins Publishers

 

Apparently, in 2017, the BBC turned SS-GB into a five-episode TV miniseries, starring Sam Riley, Rainer Bock, Lars Eidinger, Kate Bosworth and James Cosmo.  I haven’t seen it, but let’s hope the BBC made a good job of it.