 (...) Like Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Xavier March is facing this last moment with an exhilaration born of having no further doubts and dilemmas, no more crucial decisions which need to be made, nothing but going through on his chosen course and dying in a just cause.And like Jordan, in sacrificing himself March is ensuring the safe escape of the woman he loves.The review by "The Guardian", written by John Mullan, notes that Harris acknowledged a debt to Len Deighton's "SS-GB" (1978), an earlier postwar alternative or "counter-factual" history that was set in Great Britain in late 1941 after the (fictional) British surrender.