Ungreened Isle

By Michael Demarest

SS-GB

by Len Deighton

Knopf; 344 pages; $9.95

It is one of the marvels of this century that the Germans did not conquer Britain in World War II. To this day, Englishmen wonder how they would have fared and behaved as an island extension of the Third Reich. The premise of Len Deighton's absorbing new novel is that there would always have been an England, even under Nazi rule.

The year is 1941. Winston Churchill has been executed. The King, rescued from the ruins of Buckingham Palace, is imprisoned in the Tower of London. The Queen and their two daughters are in exile in Australia. Thousands of Britons have been deported to work in German factories. A puppet government is ensconced in Westminster, but the Nazis jackboot the country as roughly as they ran occupied France. In Britain, too, there is a tough Resistance movement, as well as profiteers who will provide any quo for a quid.

How does an honorable Englishman comport himself? Deighton's engaging, complex hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, 30, carries on, tackling the tricky homicide cases for which he is celebrated (the Pimlico bread knife slaying, the Great Yarmouth seafood murder). Now, however, Oxonian Archer and his boozy, street-smart assistant, Detective Sergeant Harry Woods, are working directly under Gruppenfuehrer Fritz Kellerman, senior SS officer and police chief of Great Britain. Unlike his compatriots, the Yard man is free to move around at will in a prewar Railton automobile; he gets German-issue cigarettes, frequent dollops of real Highland Scotch, and attends fraternal parties at which the occupiers, and collaborationists from bed, board room and Burke's Peerage, shamelessly down quantities of beluga caviar and champagne.

Because he keeps the murder rate down, Archer keeps receiving such indulgences from Kellerman, a deceptively jolly Bavarian who affects the tweedy foibles of an English squire. Inevitably, it is bruited about that the Superintendent is Gestapo; he narrowly escapes two assassination attempts by the Resistance.

But the Super's upper lip remains stiff until, on the trail of a London killer, Doug las locates a clandestine German atomic installation on England's south coast. Struggling to find his bearings in a maze of intrigue and counterintrigue, Archer joins a Resistance conspiracy to spirit the King out of the country and the atomic secrets into American hands. Things do not work out that simply. No Len Deighton plot ever does. In his unraveling, the au thor of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin produces a series of memorable set pieces. In one celebrating German-Soviet Friendship Week (Hitler had decided not to invade the Soviet Union), there is an at tempt to disinter the bones of Marx from his Highgate resting place for reburial in Mother Russia; old Karl gets no closer to Moscow than he did in his lifetime.

The atmosphere of occupied England is limned in eerie detail, even to the signs outside fashionable shops and restaurants saying JEWISH UNDERTAKING. In fact, Deighton's ungreened isle frequently seems even more realistic than the authentic backgrounds of his previous nov els. He has also assembled a pulsing cast of characters in which the Nazis for a change are human and susceptible. For good local reasons, SS-GB is Deighton's biggest-selling book yet in England. For better reasons, it is on its way to becoming a worldwide classic of the "What If?" genre.

-- Michael Demarest

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