Guy Saville’s debut novel follows in the tradition of imagining a world in which the Nazis were victorious in World War Two – Len Deighton’s SS-GB and Robert Harris’s Fatherland are big jackboots for Saville to fill, and I am pleased to say that he manages to fill them with aplomb in this, the first volume of a planned trilogy. There are two main elements to making this kind of fiction all that it can be: a plausible backstory that allows the reader to accept the alternative reality in which its set, and a genuinely pacey and engaging plot. The Afrika Reich has both.

First, the backstory. These things work best when they home in on one of the ‘hinges of fate’ by which history is decided, change the outcome of that event and then follow the consequences through in a logical way. In this book, Hitler did not issue the order to hold back from attacking the evacuating British Expeditionary Force, resulting a massacre on the beaches of Dunkirk from which the British will to fight never recovered. With Churchill resigning and being succeeded by Lord Halifax, Britain makes peace with Germany, America never enters the war in Europe and Germany is able to turn on and defeat the Soviet Union without having any enemies to its rear. As an historian, there’s nothing about this scenario that I have any difficulty with, and the German interest in Africa as a source of Imperial prestige and natural resources, borne out by pre-1945 documents quoted by Saville, is perfectly plausible too.

Now to the story itself. Burton Cole is a retired mercenary who was present at the Dunkirk massacre and who subsequently undertook many missions in Africa, a continent now largely divided between the British and the Germans. When a shadowy diplomat comes calling, offering him the chance to settle an old score with the man who is now Governor General of Deutsch Kongo (Congo), he takes the mission, against his better judgment. With a small crew of mercs and misfits, the mission kicks off with apparent success – but soon, nothing is going right for Cole’s crew and they find themselves fugitives in a country largely denuded of its native inhabitants (subject of something known as the Windhoek Decree, they have been ‘deported’ to the Sahara, where their fate is unknown, though not hard to guess) and swarming with SS and German soldiery. Their attempts to escape are thwarted by the Germans intentions to invade both Portuguese Angola and British-occupied Northern Rhodesia, and they fall in with black African members of the Angolan resistance, who know that the German invasion means much more than a change of government for their people.

The brutality of the SS regime in German Africa is entirely in keeping with the treatment meted out to the peoples of Eastern Europe, and Saville delivers thrills worthy of Len Deighton, Alistair McLean (for me, this was particularly reminiscent of The Guns of Navarone) and other masters of the WW2 thriller, in a way that’s both action packed and thought provoking, which is a difficult trick to pull off. Bravo.

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