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Sunday, 25 May 2025

A PIECE OF RESISTANCE - Book review



I suspect the title of Clive Egleton’s 1970 speculative novel A Piece of Resistance is a play on words – pièce de la résistance. It concerns the Russian invasion of Britain, published ten years after Fitz Gibbon’s alternate history novel When the Kissing had to Stop. It’s a third person narrative almost entirely from the point of view of Daniel Garnett who is an escaped prisoner working under an assumed name for the Resistance. ‘Four years ago I had a wife, a small son and a house in Keynsham until a SCRAGG Missile with a ten Megaton warhead hit Bristol, and then there was no wife, no son, and no house. Maybe there are people around who can accept the Armistice, but I’m not among their number’ (p23).

The police hunt resistance members. Yet some police are informers for the Resistance. A few resistance cells resort to bank robbery to finance arms purchases. One raid goes wrong and those who get away are being hunted. The Russian authorities have taken 200 hostages as two of their soldiers were slain.

Garnett reluctantly attempts to find the culprits. He’s torn – and very probably deceived too.

There are insights into how Britain has changed.

‘We had an arsenal of terrifying weapons which we couldn’t and didn’t dare to use. But they did. Just the one, to show us that it was all over, and that’s the way our world ended, not with a whimper but with a bang’ (p81).

‘A car for every Russian made in Birmingham. They’ll have all of us walking before long. My car’s been off the road for three weeks waiting for two new tyres, and I’m supposed to have priority’ (p33).

Egleton was a leading thriller writer for forty years with inside knowledge of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. His style is very readable and quite thrilling.

‘For a few paces his stride remained unchecked even though the blood was spurting from the hole in his throat, and then, quite suddenly, he collapsed like a rag doll’ (p47).

This is the first Garnett book in a trilogy; the others are Last Post for a Partisan and The Judas Mandate.

Clive Egleton died in 2006, aged 79. His novel Seven Days to a Killing was filmed as The Black Windmill starring Michael Caine. 

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