Let us join our protagonist, Owen Meredith, on a blissful family holiday outing: Christmas shopping in London, with wife Lyneth and their two daughters. Owen's leading a happy and prosperous life as a TV documentary maker specializing in the annals of warfare. Too bad all his security is about to be utterly undone by a freak trauma. Exiting a shop, he experiences an overwhelming cataclysmic impact of some sort—terrorist explosion?—and loses consciousness. When he awakens, he's utterly helpless—but in a novel fashion.

Owen's consciousness has been transported across dimensions to an alternate existence. He's a helpless, disembodied point of view inside the head of his doppelganger, Maj. Owain Maredudd. Owen can share Owain's senses and his surface thoughts and memories, but he cannot otherwise exert control or make his mental presence known to his host. He's just along for the ride. And a horrific ride it is.

Owain's world is one where—60 years after Hitler's premature death sent everything down a different path—the belligerent chaos of World War II mutated and never ceased. Europe, including the United Kingdom and Germany, is now the Alliance, its enemy the Russians. America has its own prosperity sphere, and it straddles both camps to some extent. The Middle East is a nuclear wasteland from the bombing that killed millions. Various scorched-earth zones exist elsewhere. The U.K. is a grim neo-Orwellian botch, ruled by "the Silicon Chancellor." And as if the status quo of old battle lines were not bad enough, the Brits are about to unveil a secret weapon named Omega.

Owen internalizes all this information in bits and pieces, while Owain's life remains ongoing. And a complicated life it is, featuring a romantic dalliance with Marisa Legister, wife of a high-placed and vindictive government official, and various military responsibilities. Then Owen begins bopping back and forth between our world and Owain's, swapping bodies helplessly. Fair enough, except that even in his home timeline, Owen is in trouble. Lyneth and the girls are missing, an ex-lover named Tanya is at his bedside, and his memories are a jumble from what Tanya says was a hit-and-run accident, not an explosion.

Which existence is real, and which false? Are both equal in ontological heft? And how can Owen/Owain possibly extricate himself from all his troubles?

Portrait of a world well lost

Certainly this novel will garner deserved comparisons to recent work by Christopher Priest, Brian Aldiss and Ian MacLeod. Evans works in the same rueful, elegiac mode as his fellow Brits. Think also of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1988). Unlike American, Turtledovian uchronias, which always seem to be about wresting control of the timestream back toward "normality" or exploiting the altered historical conditions for fun and profit and adventures, U.K. alternate histories revel in fleshing out doomed scenarios that possess an inertia all their own, and which serve as object moral lessons. And indeed, Evans's scenario does just that.

The moody tangibility of Owain's dire circumstances—"Decades of warfare had led to pollution and ionisation of the upper atmosphere so that the skies were seldom truly dark by night or free of murkiness by day."—drives home to the reader exactly what a charmed life we lead nowadays. Despite surging gasoline prices, acts of terrorism, greenhouse effects and other global worries, our world—and thus Owen's—is a utopia by comparison to Owain's. This ability of SF to shine a light on the historical record, giving us a fresh retrospective view of our century, and exactly how lucky we've been, is an extremely useful and valuable tool that mainstream fiction cannot supply. And indeed, reading about Owain's universe is a salutary tonic for any pessimism about our current lives.

The closest American work to this one might be something by Philip K. Dick, say his Time Out of Joint (1959), with its claustrophobic atmosphere of perpetual war. And although there's nothing as surreal here as Ragle Gumm's famous fugues of objects being replaced by slips of paper, Evans exploits the weird mental confusion of Owen/Owain to a very capable and shuddery degree.

What he's secondarily concerned with is the working out of Owen/Owain's moral responsiblities, as both men seek to untangle their familial and sexual relationships. Almost as much of the novel's text relates to these issues as to larger geopolitical ones. Yet while the conclusion finds Owen achieving some closure and insight, I felt the ending to Owain's thread to be less satisfying and more abrupt, thus forestalling some of my prior pleasure in his tale and lending this otherwise highly intriguing and worthy book its only stumbling moment.