The Germans Are Coming

RESISTANCE

By Owen Sheers

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 306 pp. $23.95

The D-Day landings have failed, and Russia has fallen. Within a short time, half of Britain is occupied by Germans. Churchill and members of his Cabinet follow King George to Canada.

This is what we discover in the gripping pages of Resistance, a first novel by Welsh writer Owen Sheers. He bases this daring alternate history on the existence of very real resistance pockets that were part of a little known force-in-waiting during World War II. The Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section was part of a larger British Resistance Organisation, which was made up of farmers and local townspeople, largely men, who intimately knew the terrain. Recruited and trained to spy on an occupying force, their job was to go to ground, if necessary (in stocked bunkers with hidden entrances and escape exits), to run messages, to create confusion, havoc and destruction amid a possible German invading force. The details of this largely unknown history have been coming to light in recent years as documentaries, private papers and museums have begun to reveal an elaborate scheme that was never put into action.

Resistance takes place in the remote and beautiful Olchon Valley in Wales. Sarah Lewis, age 26, wakes one morning to find that her husband is gone. As it turns out, each of a handful of women in this rugged farming community finds herself alone. The disappearance of their men is followed by the arrival of a German patrol, under the leadership of Albrecht Wolfram, a young captain who had been a visiting student at Oxford prior to the war. What follows is an uneasy and fragile relationship between six soldiers and the Welsh farm women, all of whom are isolated during the long, snowbound winter.

The major accomplishment of this novel is that Sheers never lets his considerable research distract from the focus of his story. He also has a subtle and rather beautiful understanding of emotional nuance, and this plays out among his characters, especially Sarah and Albrecht. It's a seductive story, made all the more appealing because it is so credibly set in circumstances that might have been. The reader ends up caring for everyone -- Welsh or German or English. To gain empathy for a large cast of characters, all of whom line up on opposing sides of the war, is no small feat. These vulnerable men and women, indeed, become the faces of war.

-- Frances Itani 's new novel, "Remembering the Bones," was recently shortlisted for a Commonwealth Award.