The Windsor Faction

In 1940, Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell’s The Loss of Eden (retitled If Hitler Comes: a cautionary tale seven months later) appeared. This was a speculative novel published two months after the fall of France, an intended counterblast to the waverers and defeatists seeking accommodation with Nazi Germany. It would be what we now call “counter-factual” fiction. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’ Fatherland and C.J. Sansom’s Dominion mine similar ground, while the “what if?” in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America had the Axis-leaning Charles Lindberg as US President.

Now D.J. Taylor weighs in with a gripping, highly convincing novel that focuses, in part, on the very waverers and defeatists against whom Brown and Serpell directed their literary fire. Here are intrigue and clever parallel narratives, but what really gives this tale authenticity is the insinuation of real people among the fictional. We meet the poet John Betjeman, the anti-Semitic Tory MP Captain Archibald Ramsay, the treacherous US diplomat based in London, Tyler Kent, and the king’s private secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, while other names – “Tom” Mosley, Lady Sybil Colefax, Moura Budberg and H.G. Wells – are also dropped in for good effect.

But, imagined or real, everyone revolves around Edward VIII, or rather the counter-fact that after the sudden death of Mrs Simpson in 1936 he remains king. He is a lonely monarch (an echo of Victoria’s long widow’s mourning) in a scruffy Buckingham Palace, sympathetic to Germany (as of course he was), and anxious to encourage those seeking a negotiated peace. In this he is assisted by another true-life character – the journalist Beverley Nichols, who writes for Edward an appeasing Christmas message, which the king substitutes at the last minute for the anodyne text prepared for him.

Taylor is skilful in evoking a sense of period (long train journeys to Sussex and secretaries who could afford to flat-share in Belgravia) and creating atmospheric set pieces, such as Mrs Simpson’s funeral, meetings of the pro-Germans and literary parties. But also one feels the heat and languor of colonial Malaya where we first meet Cynthia Kirkpatrick, the daughter of an expat family. On returning to London, she finds work with a wonderfully conjured literary magazine, Duration (housed in Bloomsbury, of course), complete with eccentric editor and owner and a fellow female worker, who inveigles her into an undercover job that helps to expose the conspirators.

One emerges from immersion in this tantalising creation admiring both Taylor’s art and the cleverness of his imagination.

Terry Philpot