Christopher Priest's multiple award-winning novel The Separation is an alternate history novel; like a great many alternate histories, it focuses on World War II, but unlike 99% of the WWII-based alternate history stories out there it doesn't posit a future where the Nazis won the war - well, not quite at least.

The story hinges on twin brothers, Joe and Jack Sawyer, who in 1936 go to Berlin to row in the Olympics for Britain. They garner some attention when they take the bronze, and in the course of receiving the congratulations of various well-wishers they encounter Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess; later that night, they start on the drive home in the company of Birgit, a young Jewish woman they have decided to help escape to Britain - mainly as a matter of principle, but also because both of them have fallen in love with her. Five years later, the war is raging and the two brothers are in very different roles: Jack is a bomber pilot with the RAF, but Joe is a conscientious objector and a fervent pacifist, and drives an ambulance for the Red Cross. And on May 10th, Rudolf Hess flies out of the Third Reich to negotiate peace with Britain - which is where the divergence in timelines occurs.

At first glance, there are two parallel timelines explored in The Separation. The first is our own, in which Joe dies in the Blitz and Jack is called on to help Churchill assess Hess's mental state, and whether his peace proposal is genuine. Jack concludes that Hess is crazy, was almost certainly not acting on Hitler's orders, and might not even be the real Hess. (All but the last of these were the actual conclusions reached by Churchill's government following Hess's mad trip to Scotland in real life; the last part is a mild conspiracy theory, but is important in setting up later features of the plot.) In the second timeline, Jack dies when his plane is shot down during an air raid, and Joe is invited by his superiors in the Red Cross to aid in the negotiations to establish a peace between the UK and Germany; Joe does so, his passionate conviction that war cannot solve anything overriding his distaste of the Nazi leadership.

The result is that peace breaks out between the two parties by 1941, with the consequence that the Second World War never quite becomes a world war. Churchill resigns as part of the requirements for peace; on the German side, a typical act of Nazi backstabbing and betrayal removes Hitler from office and installs Hess in his place. The occupied countries of Western Europe are, in theory, set free, although allusions to a National Front government existing in France in the 1940s suggests that the Nazis made sure they left friends in the seats of power when they left. Britain and Germany adopt a policy of benevolent neutrality towards each other, to last 25 years. The most troubling term of the peace settlement is the requirement that Britain evacuate all Jews from Western Europe to Madagascar, to set up their own little state there (a plan actually contemplated by Nazi Germany), in effect making Britain complicit in the Holocaust. (The novel gives no reason to suppose that the horrors of the death camps were averted - most of Europe east of Germany is still left in Nazi control by the peace deal, after all - but it never alludes to them, raising the troubling possibility that the truth never came out in this timeline.)

And of course, the effects of the peace ripple out from there. The Nazis invade the Soviet Union on schedule, and because they are not fighting a war on two fronts Operation Barbarossa is vastly more successful than it was in our world. There are allusions to Ukraine remaining under the Nazi jackboot until the 1950s, and a prolonged war between the US and the Nazi empire, fought across the frozen tundra of Siberia and lasting at least until 1960, when Richard Nixon is elected on an isolationist "get the boys back home" ticket. In the fictional 1999 of the novel, in which a puzzled researcher tries to solve the mystery of the Sawyer twins, Germany is no longer a Nazi nation, but it took a prolonged European Union-sponsored denazification process to set the country right after the catastrophic collapse of the regime; meanwhile, an isolationist United States backslides into tyranny, the Jewish State of Masada fights a constant battle against Madagascan guerrilla warriors, and Britain's continued control of the Suez canal, Palestine, and other key regions of the Middle East means that the UK is probably the strongest and most powerful country in the world. And all it took was a bloodstained handshake and complicity in ethnic cleansing.

It is, in short, not an alternate history in which the Nazis win in the long term (they secure themselves a couple of extra decades in power, no more), or in which Britain loses (Britain enjoys great economic and political power because it didn't cripple itself and wreck its ability to maintain the Empire through the costs of a six-year war with Germany). It isn't even unpleasant enough to really qualify as a dystopia. But it is still an extraordinary repulsive history, and a world which I would never want to live in myself, although part of its frightening power is in the fact that the inhabitants of said world accept the situation so happily, reasoning that things could have been so much worse if the German War (as it is known in the UK) had worn on beyond 1941.

Where The Separation diverges from the usual alternate history fare is that the book isn't really about the events of the alternate history per se; most of the details I outline above are easily inferred by the opening chapter of the book, and the short interval about halfway through, in which we get brief glimpses of the world of 1999 in the "Joe Timeline"; the book's not about the consequences of the divergence of timelines, but the act of divergence itself. The straightforward story I have outlined above can be worked out by the reader about a quarter of the way through the story; where things get really interesting is when Priest starts making you second-guess the facts, and begins alluding the fact that there are not just two timelines presented in the story, that there is in fact a whole host of possible different courses history could have taken, with the jumping-off point being the events of May 10th, 1941.

To achieve this multiplication of timelines Priest relies on some old tricks to get some decidedly interesting results; his preoccupation with twins and doubles, as seen in The Prestige, is the most obvious one: aside from Jack and Joe, we also make the acquaintance of Winston Churchill's double (who spends most of his time touring bombsites in the guise of Churchill, cheering people up), and hints Hess drops during an uncomfortable conversation with Jack in 1936 suggest that he has a secret double of his own. Which Hess is real - the one who flew to Scotland and taken prisoner, or the one who flew to Stockholm to negotiate a peace? In Joe's timeline, is it Churchill who agrees to the peace deal, or has he been replaced by his impersonator? Was Hess's preoccupation with a mysterious "peace party" in Britain a simple matter of delusion and denial, or does it imply secret knowledge of an alliance of pacifists and appeasers who would be willing to negotiate behind Churchill's back?

Joe's part of the narrative also brings in the same sort of delirious merging of realities that dominated The Affirmation (a book so good I didn't review it for Ferretbrain, because I realised it was far smarter than I am and I didn't feel qualified to comment on it). Having sustained head injuries when his ambulance was bombed, Joe is haunted by vividly lucid hallucinations concerning his brother and Birgit - which might not be hallucinations at all, but glimpses of closely related alternate timelines. It's here where the real emotional core of the book lies, because as important - if not more so - than the split between our history and that sparked by the peace deal with Hess is the personal gulf that exists between Joe and Jack, fuelled as it is by their differences over the war and over Birgit. Events seem to conspire to prevent a reconciliation, as though the differences between the two had become so profound the very universe is keeping them apart; every time Joe thinks he's finally confronted Jack, it turns out to be one of his strange episodes - either he's hallucinating and is psychologically incapable of facing his brother, or he's being violently torn out of those timelines in which he manages to meet up with his brother.

I suppose any reader's reaction to The Separation is going to hinge on their attitude to the brothers, and on their own politics; their political disputes (as opposed to those over Birgit) are on such emotive topics that it's more or less impossible not to have an opinion. Personally, I have far more time for Jack than I do Joe. He is far less politicised, but at the same time he doesn't lack a conscience or a critical mind when it comes to the war (he has major issues with the shift in the bombing campaign from strikes on military targets to saturation bombing of cities). He is enough of a cad to do a few dubious things when the opportunity arises, but isn't so self-absorbed that he doesn't feel guilty about them. He's not really adept at politics or philosophy, but he can at least interact with people in a sensible fashion, whereas Joe has an iron grasp on ideology but fails miserably when it comes to dealing with living, breathing human beings. His marriage to Birgit seems to be based more on the fact that she was a persecuted individual who needed saving than actual love; he does undeniably love her, but as always with Joe politics and ideology come first. His main response to Birgit falling pregnant is a redoubling of his devotion to peace, but that same devotion takes him further and further away from Birgit and his unborn child; his dedication to his political work drives a wedge between him and every human relationship.

The most damning thing, to me, is the fact that his devotion to pacifism and his determination to do the right thing does end one war, but in doing so gives carte blanche to Hess to start another war; the fact that Joe never even considers the broader implications of the deal reveals a dangerous naivety at the heart of his actions; Joe essentially assumes that if Hess wants peace with the UK, he must want peace with everyone, and never considers the possibility that the negotiations may be conducted in bad faith, or with an eye to advancing a different agenda. It almost seems that having his child born into a country at peace has become so important to Joe, as a point of principle and as part of Joe's responsibility to his family, that it doesn't matter to him whether the rest of the world burns - and it doesn't occur to him that there's a "rest of the world " to burn. He is ultimately just as parochial and narrow-minded as Jack, except Jack doesn't entangle Britain in the Holocaust and shovel all of eastern Europe into the maw of the Third Reich, so it was eventually with some satisfaction that I read to the end and watched Joe's tiny little world crumble around him.

Others may have an entirely different take on it than me, but I suppose that's part of the point: The Separation is a story about division, and it would not have worked so well if the underlying issues were not convincingly divisive. It's also a meticulously researched study of life during wartime which illuminates some aspects that are usually entirely ignored, such as the work of the Red Cross, who are delegated to spear carriers in most war narratives. I'd eagerly recommend it to anyone looking to explore Priest's writing, along with The Affirmation. (As good as it is, I don't think The Prestige is as brilliant as the other two.)