What if it turned out that Victorian spiritualists were right about the afterlife? That ghosts existed and we could communicate with them? In an alternate 1938, even death can't set a sun on the British Empire. The Summer Court rules from the afterlife, committees of Etonian spirits directing the business of Empire. Of course, there's an alternative to ectocapitalism and the business of Queen Victoria's Summer Court. The Soviet Union is ruled by a vast godlike intelligence, built around the soul of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Two two sides are engaged in a classic war of espionage, with a hot front in the Spanish Civil War, and in a reflection of the historical Cambridge Five, the British Secret Intelligence Service is hopelessly compromised by a mole.

Peter Bloom is that mole, a double agent who believes he's serving the interests of peace and the power of the Soviet Presence. Against him is Rachel White, one of the few women in the SIS. White is by far the more interesting character, full of pent up rage about her stalled career, sexism, and her invalid husband, a retired living weapon from the First World War. Unfortunately, Bloom is our viewpoint into the more unique world of the dead, a profoundly strange four-dimensional space overlaid with a facade of Victorian normalcy, and he's much less interesting, despite being the mole.

This book is at it's best exploring the consequences of a real afterlife, and the way that society changes when the real powers are all on the other side. Subtle nods to the real world are also a high-point, Kim Philby makes a guest appearance, and the British Prime Minister is Herbert Blanco West, speculative fiction author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Stalin is a Communist renegade, trying to develop a human network to destroy the Presence. The aetheric technology of transdimensional phones and ectoplasmic IT is unique.

Yet Bloom's character in particular never clicked for me, and his chapters were perennial flat notes. Great spy novels in the tradition of John Le Carre play on intimacy and betrayal. The relationship between a source and a handler is closer than marriage. Yet spies can't be seen as people; they're assets to be used, turned, and ultimate burnt for the cause. And knowing the Peter is the mole, and also seeing inside his head, eliminates the amazing tension that a more conventional Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy structure has.

The last act tries to wrap everything up, the origins of Peter's betrayals, the bigger picture of the afterlife, but it comes out of left field. Summerland is a good story, but it isn't as tightly wound as a great one.