Caliphate

Updated Saturday 10 May, 2008 12:19 PM | Headlines | Discussion Forum | International Edition

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Caliphate (Tom Kratman)

"The hare wasted no tears for the one that might have been its mate. Though the female was dead, the male would live, for the nonce. It would feed, even as the raptors fed on the corpse of the female.

How much better then, a man than a hare?"

There are basically three distressing facts concerning the future of Europe; the European population is either remaining stable or is falling, the non-ethnic European population is rising, and there are no major large-scale programs to integrate the latter into the former. Is this a problem? Well, the bombs that detonated in London might just suggest, to the even slightly suspicious mind, that we do have a problem on our hands. How large is this problem? We don’t know…

In Caliphate, Tom Kratman posits a future in which the non-ethnic European population – the Muslim population – has risen to such a level that the continent (excepting Britain, of which more later) has effectively fallen into their hands. The smarter non-Muslims have fled, to America, to South Africa, to Australia…while those unlucky or stupid enough to remain there too long have been enslaved by the Caliphate, treated as second-class citizens at best, worthless animals at worst. The situation isn’t much better for the Muslim population, either; apart from those in control, they are at the mercy of the religious police and at risk of a nuclear war with…

On the other side of the Atlantic, America is an empire, held together through a massive internal security system and waging endless war against the Muslim population of the world. Eighty years ago, there was a massive nuclear terrorist attack against America (and London) and the net result was the rise to power of a madman, who launched a massive retaliatory strike against the Middle East and created the first real American Empire by invading Canada, Cuba and several other states. This has had a number of foreseeable consequences for America; the freedoms of the 20^th century have been swept away in the desperate desire for safety.

(And Tom points out that this is not a good idea.)

Into this extremely depressing world come three sets of characters; a brother and sister who were sold into slavery, an American soldier turned into a spy, and a young woman, growing up in the pre-Caliphate years. The first two become interlinked as they struggle to destroy a secret biological weapon and escape the Caliphate, while the third story – told mostly through interludes, somewhat to my disappointment, as I would have liked to have seen more of that – watches the decline and fall of European civilisation. We, the readers, know the outcome; Tom does very, very, well capturing her perfectly. Even if you don’t like his politics, or the outcome, you have to respect the competence he brings to this part of the book.

Overall, Caliphate may be the most competent book that Tom has ever produced. I was a little concerned at first - a spy story is pretty different from his other books – but he handles it very well, leaving behind the massive scale of A Desert Called Peace or the violent fury of the struggles against the Posleen for the much more compact and well-executed, if nightmarish, world of Caliphate. The characters are better – and the first sympathetic Muslim characters of his work – and while there are some irregularities in his world, overall it hangs together fairly well.

One point that does need to be explored is the issue of the British Monarchy vis-à-vis the actual balance of power within the United Kingdom. Americans seem to like the British Royals more than we Brits do – although Tom’s sentiments regarding Princess Diana seem to be in accordance with my own – and I admit that I had to do some word-eating when it turned out that Harry actually did serve in Afghanistan (although not as much as I would have done if the MOD hadn’t betrayed every other British soldier, past and present, by hauling him out of Afghanistan as soon as that actually became public), but that doesn’t matter. In the UK, the real power lies with the Prime Minister and Parliament; it doesn’t lie with the Royal Family.

If London were to be destroyed in a nuclear blast – as put forward in Caliphate – emergency protocols would have devolved power onto the senior surviving military officer and the senior surviving member of the cabinet, one of whom is always supposed to be outside London. (IIRC, during the notorious purple flour incident, the Minister of Defence, Geoff Hoon, was not in London and, if the incident had been a terrorist attack, would have been PM by the end of the day.) This doesn’t lead to Harry becoming a ‘King in more than name’ – this leads to a War Cabinet and rapid elections to replace Parliament. Even if all of the Cabinet and Parliament were killed, there would still be other centres of power in the country. About the only circumstance that might lead to a royal revival would be a nuclear attack on a massive scale, or a Change (SM Stirling’s The Protector’s War), that alters everything beyond repair. It’s much more likely that whoever was left as PM decided to implement a police state, rather like 1940-45, on their own.

Anyway…I would have liked to have seen more of the formation of the Caliphate, particularly how it integrated the different Muslim groups under one banner (France has Arabs, Germany has Turks, UK has Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis and never the twain shall meet) and just how it holds together with a crumbling edifice. One thought; the US/UK mounted strikes against the EU’s military when it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a 11^th hour salvation and this was used to bind the Caliphate together. Hopefully, there will be a sequel exploring a different aspect of this dystopia.

There are also quite a few tips of the hat to the alternate history community; airships, Nazi/Draka-style South Africa, revived Tsarist Russia…all of which made me smile.

In conclusion, it’s quite easy to compare this book to DC Alden’s Invasion. Tom is a much more competent writer than Alden (who goes off on irrelevant tangents half the time and really needed a good editor), but both books evoke similar emotional responses; rather more chillingly, I knew that Invasion was impossible, but Caliphate is not. The interludes and Gabi’s life – who is a great improvement upon Gudrun of WOTR, who I hated so much that I stole the name for a character in Fall of Night – are particularly chilling, more so, oddly, than Petra’s life. In those interludes, the familiar becomes hauntingly different…and dark. Caliphate pulls no punches and is not for the faint of heart.

(And who is the guy on the cover? I’m sure I know him from somewhere.)

Eight out of Ten.

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