Book Review: One Half of the World

Book Review: 'One Half of the World' by James Barlow

3 / 5 Stars

'One Half of the World' (277 pp) was published in hardback by Harper and Brothers (U.S.) in 1957 (as far as I can tell, no paperback edition ever was released).

James Barlow was born in 1921 in Birmingham, England, and was of Welsh background. During World War Two he served in the Royal Air Force as a gunnery instructor before being discharged due to tuberculosis. After convalescing in a sanitarium (the first randomized clinical trial for the efficacy of streptomycin against tuberculosis took place in 1946), Barlow took a job with the city of Birmingham water bureau.

In 1956 he  published his first novel, ‘The Protagonists’. He eventually took up writing full time and published another 12 novels (in the crime, suspense, and political thriller genres) before dying at age 51 in 1973.

'One Half' is set in Britain in 1960, two years after Soviet Russia (referred to throughout the novel with the euphemism 'Occupiers') has conquered Western Europe, during the course of which they nuked London (!)

The United States remains hostile to this New Order, and supports a small, but determined, Resistance movement in the U.K.

The protagonist of 'One Half' is a 36 year-old, clean cut, tall, level-headed  man named Trevor George Baxter. A veteran of World War Two, Baxter is an investigator with the Internal Insecurity Police, dedicated to ferreting out saboteurs, subversives, and other enemies of the State. Baxter serves the Occupiers with the equanimity of the Company Man, convinced that efforts to overthrow his country's overlords risk fostering chaos and the implosion of British society.

Early in the novel Baxter meets, and becomes infatuated by, an eighteen year-old Elizabeth Taylor lookalike named Gillian Smallwood. It turns out that Gillian is religious and meets regularly with other Christians to worship; while not banned by the Occupiers, such activity is frowned upon. Baxter soon realizes that courting Gillian will mean adopting her beliefs; this in turn changes his willingness to advance the aims of the Occupation. 

It also jeopardizes his high standing in the Internal Security Police, and the brutish Detective Sergeant Eric Woodley, who nurses a deep and abiding hatred for Baxter, will be too happy to exploit any mis-steps on Baxter's part..............

'One Half of the World' is not an action-driven storyline along the lines of the 2000 AD comic 'Invasion !', where truck (er, 'lorry') driver Bill Savage wields a sawed-off shotgun and wages violent war against the hated 'Volgans'. 

Rather, it is a deliberately-paced exploration of the conversion from atheism to Christianity on the part of Trevor Baxter and, consequent to this, Baxter's realization that the ideologies of the Occupiers are designed to permanently erase the psyches of conquered peoples. The novel winds up being overburdened with many lengthy passages dealing with this philosophical argument.

Another weakness of 'One Half' is the deracination, as it were, of the Soviets; by referring to them as 'Occupiers', author Barlow imparts generic quality to the villains (the one Occupier that is mentioned by name in the entirety of the novel is a Major with the ambiguous surname of Frosch, as opposed to something more 'Cyrillic' in nature). This failure to imbue the narrative with a full awareness the odious nature of the Soviet / Marxist regime fails to give an effective grounding to the struggle of the oppressed Brits against the Occupation.  

Summing up, I can't recommend 'One Half of the World' as a particularly impressive treatment of the premise of a near-future Britain under the thumb of the Commies. Readers are better off looking for the adventures of Bill Savage in the pages of 2000 AD.