ABSTRACT
In 1978, mesmerized by a book jacket, I bought a thriller set in a past which had never happened. The jacket—possibly a photograph, possibly a trompe l’oeil painting—displayed a collection of mundane objects on a white background: in one upper corner the designer had placed a crumpled, hand-addressed envelope with a cancelled British postage stamp featuring the head of Adolph Hitler, under which lay a grimy book of ration coupons, some German-issued Occupation currency, and a carte d’identite looking something like a contemporary passport, opened out so that one could see a photograph with an official swastika stamp and some hand-inked endorsements. There may have been a handful of coins strewn across the bottom of the frame. This collection sprawled across the white field as if someone had emptied the contents of his pockets onto a dresser top before going to bed. The objects looked disorientingly realistic, and if you were a certain age, and raised in a certain (and in 1978 very widespread) political tradition, the picture was obscenely fascinating. In 1978 the summer and fall of 1940 seemed the pivot on which morally-intelligible history turned, the moment when so many had come to owe so much to so few. The history of the Second World War was sacred history in an otherwise secular age. But that book cover evoked a world in which history was hideously, plausibly and vertiginously otherwise. And the very ordinariness of that imagined detritus of a German occupation of Britain was utterly uncanny. It was not the first alternate history of WWII I had ever read—someone at summer camp had lent me a copy of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle—but that photograph, far more than the text of Len Deighton’s fairly hum-drum thriller, exerted a spell from which I have never quite escaped: I will still read almost any alternate history of WWII I come across, despite much bitter experience suggesting the probability that the thing is going to be pretty ghastly.
