A slightly more thoughtful story than a couple of the predecessors in the volume, as befitting a social work academic. He sets his story in East Anglia, as he often does, populating the story with pretty average kinds of people in pretty strange circumstances. The main character here is a history teacher, suddenly, horribly disorientated by the realisation that the history he is teaching, English history, is shifting to a tectonic extent under his feet even as speaks.
It’s a horribly unnerving experience, as the new history on which his life is predicated gradually becomes the norm, and he finds himself in an England in which he, and the rest of the ‘English’ population, are suddenly seen as incomers, despite having lived there for several hundred years, as older claimants on the territory are re-asserting their rights. It’s a horrible depiction of the realities of what -is- happening elsewhere on the planet, bringing it home, to those who need it spelling out, the horrors of occupation, ancient wrongs ‘put right’ by new wrongs, and man’s inhumanity to man.
