ABSTRACT
James Michener’s Centennial was a bestseller cunningly designed to ride on a crest of American bicentennial celebrations. The 1,100-page saga monotonously chronicles the American spirit’s victory over all adversaries from the primeval rocks of some three billion years ago through the first ‘inhabitants’—diplodocus and allosaurus-to the great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Centennial serenely took its place at the top of America’s bestseller lists: the hardback came out in 1974, the more lucrative paperback came out in the centennial year, 1976, and the most lucrative television tie-in edition appeared in 1979. At the same period in Britain, Len Deighton’s SS-GB was a superseller that did unusually well. The hardback sold over 100,000 in 1978; the paperback headed the British bestseller lists in early 1980. This work, together with other successful British ‘as if’ narratives (The Alteration, An Englishman’s Castle) bespoke a curious sense of national defeat and exhaustion, directly opposite to America’s (admittedly whipped-up) buoyancy and centennial pride. (Centennial had its companion novels as well, eager to cash in on the appetite for epic ‘making of America’ themes in the mid-1970s: such blockbusters as Howard Fast’s The Immigrants and John Jakes’s The Kent Family Chronicles’— subtitled the ‘American Bicentennial Series’. All share Centennial’s national optimism and narcissistic self-satisfaction.)
Len Deighton’s SS-GB is clearly spun off, in one sense, from his historical fiction and history tout court of the Second World War (Bomber and Fighter). The novel portrays a 1941 England whose empire has imploded like a white dwarf:
The plot of SS-GB is that of a murder hunt by Scotland Yard (‘business as usual’) in the transformed Nazi colony. This eventually becomes mixed up with the ‘secret weapon’ (the atom bomb-more potent than historical Germany’s V2) which will perhaps one day lead to liberation. All this is exciting enough, but the really powerful element in SS-GB is its setting and its atmosphere of national enervation. The forms of English society, its jurisprudence and police procedure are much the same as ever. But they rest on an alien ideological base-the base that elsewhere in fiction, Deighton’s fighters and bombers helped defeat forever in 1945. Deighton ‘s novel is experienced by the British reader as an assemblage of ‘effects’, a making-strange or defamiliarization of ‘our’ country. It presents a London, for example, in which the shells of the imperial past horribly survive the national energy that once created and informed them:
Victoria, Victory and Victorian achievement are all con-founded in such descriptions. Even the cosy rituals that got the British through the dark nights of the blitz (‘We can take it!’) are ruined; the ‘nice cup of tea’, for instance, offered the policeman hero by his landlady:
There is nothing in SS-GB of the ‘grim warning’ school of fiction. It strikes very differently from, for example, Sinclair Lewis’s impassioned vision of fascist takeover in the US, It Can’t Happen Here, or Constantine Fitzgibbon’s equally urgent fantasy of Soviet takeover in the UK, When the Kissing Had to Stop. But Deighton’s novel is, of course, generically different. These other works are ‘awful prophecies’; they foretell a possible future and strike a loud-mouthed Cassandra pose. Deighton’s quieter work belongs to a new and ingenious form of historical fiction known in sf (where it originated) as the ‘alternative universe’ novel. The most famous example is Philip K.Dick’s ‘classic’ of 1962, The Man in the High Castle, which portrays an America defeated and occupied by the Second World War Axis powers. Following Dick’s breakthrough, alternative universe fiction has had a good run in sf, but before the mid-1970s had made no impact on the British bestseller lists. Nor was SS-GB a single exception. At the same time that it was selling its hundreds of thousands many of its readers must also have watched the BBC’s serial An Englishman’s Castle (BBC-2 early 1979, BBC-1 late 1979), and some must have already taken in an unusual novel of Kingsley Amis’s, The Alteration, which made the 1976 bestseller lists, if not as spectacularly as Deighton did two years after.
