James Walton

The Windsor Faction, by D.J. Taylor – review

In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now in The Windsor Faction, he brings us a counterfactual version. What would have happened in 1939 if Mrs Simpson had conveniently died three years earlier, leaving Edward VIII free to stay on the throne?  Would he have prevented war with Germany — perhaps even by treacherous means?

Taylor explores these questions from a variety of perspectives. In big London houses, groups such as the Nordic League and the White Knights of St Athelstan meet to campaign against Britain’s involvement in a ‘Jewish war’, convinced that they have the king’s unspoken support. In Buckingham Palace, the man himself frets about the limits on his power, but remains uncertain what he’d do if he had more of it. Meanwhile in Bloomsbury, even a small literary magazine finds itself drawn into the world of plot and counter-plot.

And yet, when we do finally get the answer to those counterfactual questions, 370 pages later, it proves distinctly anti-climactic. After months of the phoney war, Germany invades France, Churchill becomes prime minister and Britain stands alone. In other words, what would have happened is what did happen. Wisely, Taylor doesn’t spell this out in so many words — and a generous reader might even admire his reluctance to sex-up the counterfactual record. Nonetheless, it does leave the novel’s premise, initially so promising, looking somewhere between rather thin and surprisingly pointless.

This problem, in fact, seems to have occurred to Taylor as well, because much of the book consists of what seems suspiciously like padding. At the level of the individual sentence, one comparatively minor but unmistakable symptom is the constant superfluous use of the word ‘oddly’ — presumably imported from Taylor’s other job as a reviewer, but here applied to the most blameless of adjectives.

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