There is a powerful and telling moment late in C.J. Carey's Queen High, a brilliant and evocative follow up to the alternate history novel Widowland, in which the story's heroine Rose Ransom recalls a line from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: "Everyone in English society is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies."
This is the reality of life in Britain in 1955, when the country remains subjugated by the Nazis in the Anglo-Saxon Alliance. Every individual is subject to the scrutiny and snitching of strangers, neighbours, friends and even family in a regime that dictates that the only loyalty that matters is to the state.
It's a key moment for two reasons, firstly because it encapsulates so clearly the oppressive reality of life in the Alliance. It also explicitly asks every reader the question most have probably already been considering throughout both books: whether modern Britain would be any different. Would we turn on each other?
Queen High, like Widowland before it, is a triumph because Carey so successfully builds that atmosphere of suspicion, fear and claustrophobia against a backdrop that is at once both familiar and alien. London is still the City of the Thames, Spitalfields and Rules restaurant but also of Heydrich Square and the Amnesia Institute, both occupying familiar landmarks.
It's not just the sense of place that is crafted with such detail and diligence but an entire ideology that is complex, chilling and credible. That ideology is based sqaurely on the suppression of the spirit, voices, identities and lives of Britain's women, each of whom is allocated to a caste that dicates everything from her job potential to her calories intake and clothing.
Rose is a 'Geli', a member of the highest caste, destined for a life ultimately dedicated to providing new life of the highest genetic order for the Alliance. At the other end of the scale are the 'Friedas', older unvalued women cursed to live in poverty in the Widowlands. Unclassified, apparently, but an important feature of the political landscape is the widowed Queen, Wallis.
And while the action is set in a warped facsimile of London, it does so against a more familiar historical backdrop, the beginning of the Cold War and the division of Europe into allies of the US and the Soviet Union. The event at the heart of Queen High is a visit to London from President Eisenhower, in search of a pact with Germany. Rose, still working at the Culture Ministry sanitising literature for Alliance sensitivities, is inevitably drawn into the intrigue. She is a heroince for the ages: strong, courageous and smart but also fraught with doubt and moral dilemma. And she's just one of a number of well-drawn and empathetic characters. There are no cartoon Nazis or Boys Own heroes here, but real people living challenging lives.
Queen High is often labelled a dystopian novel, and that is core to its instant appeal, but this multi-layered novel is so much more than that. First and foremost it's a terrific thriller, taut with tension and drama throughout. It's a feminist novel with important messages about the role of women in society. It also has much to say about literature and poetry and their roles in our private and public affairs. And it also holds a mirror up to modern society, not least in its discussion of Austen's 'neighbourhood of voluntary spies' and the way in which we trust and treat each other in society.
During that conversation Rose's companion recalls life in Berlin at the start of the Nazi regime. "I thought it could never happen here, in Britain." Given what we've witnessed here in the past decade, could any one of us believe that again?
This is a rich and compelling novel, and one that, like Widowland, demands a sequel. The impatient wait has begun again.