Spencer j. Quinn reviews K. M. Breakey’s “Britain on the Brink”

“They say I’m radicalized,” said Ozzie, as if reading Jack’s mind. “Bollocks. I’m de-programmed, that’s all. I see the world as it is. I’m no bloody criminal. I’m a patriot who’s had enough.”

***

Serial fiction has always been a great way to preserve not just characters and storylines, but also the real-life cultures and milieus surrounding them. In many cases, it uses what’s known in television as the law of the expanding middle. In classic Aristotelian fashion, there’s a beginning, of course, but once you reach the middle, you never seem to reach the end of it. The middle expands. The whole point was to keep Gilligan on that island at the end of every episode, despite how hard he and his friends had just tried to escape. Each installment is not quite a sequel; rather it’s an opportunity to place familiar characters with familiar goals into unique circumstance with unique challenges. For some reason, the formula works well with pairs: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Holmes and Watson, Bertie and Jeeves, just to name a few.

Thanks to K.M. Breakey’s 2025 novel Britain on the Brink, the Dissident Right now has its dynamic duo of serial fiction, which will hopefully one day rival the above pantheon. Jack Campbell, a corporate banker and family man, has taken the red pill, but keeps quiet about it for the sake of his self-made fortune and domestic bliss. But he’s not above drinking a pint or two with the lads down at the pub. There he invariably finds his best mate Oswald “Ozzie” Fletcher holding court over the decay of his beloved England. Ozzie says he doesn’t care about football (a.k.a. soccer), but holds court over that as well. He’s just annoyed that so many of the players in English kits are really foreigners. Quickly the reader realizes that these men are beyond conservative, beyond reactionary. They are dissidents who pine for the day in the not-so-distant past when England was truly, ethnically, English. They resent mass immigration into their country, and they have contempt for their traitorous government who allowed it to happen. When lathered up with enough beer, they can get pretty vociferous about it.

In their entertaining exchanges, Ozzie plays the id to Jack’s ego, and there really is no super ego holding them back. Yet Ozzie has a soul. There’s just almost no space between love and hate with him. One moment, he’s as loyal and true as a puppy dog, and the next he is an enraged rottweiler chomping at the bit. It’s all instinct and action with Ozzie, and he’s got the scars from countless brawls to prove it. He’s a working class bloke who knows what’s right and is willing to fight for it. With Jack however, we have forethought and urbanity doused with a healthy appreciation of danger. He’s not averse to taking risks, as long as they are calculated risks. He didn’t climb up the corporate ladder and make a big success out of himself for nothing. Unlike Ozzie, however, Jack also has something more than just his career to lose: namely, his wife and two young children.

With Jack and Ozzie, Breakey has given us a great team, one that’s ready-made for adventure. And since both men are at heart English identitarians in an age when English identitarians are openly suppressed in their homeland, there’s plenty of adventure awaiting them.

By chapter three, we learn that the central conceit of Britain on the Brink is time travel. Jack discovers quite out of the blue that he has the ability to produce visions which allow him to will himself back in time. His first stop is the 1966 World Cup, which Breakey describes in loving detail. Jack witnesses not only the crowning achievement of British football, its 4-2 victory over West Germany, but how unified, peaceful, and natural England was back when all of its inhabitants were white. He’s mesmerized because prior to this, he had experienced only multicultural, multiracial England with all its crime, terrorism, and corruption. The past, as he just learned, was something else indeed:

The reality of England in 1966 – of London – had penetrated his soul with a mighty blast of ancestral recognition. Jack struggled to put language to his feelings. Finally, a suitable phrase dawned. It was as if he’d been home. A profound sense of being home. Of being whole. Of relaxing – truly relaxing – for what may have been the first time in his life.

This stark dichotomy becomes one of the main themes of Britain on the Brink, and as it unfolds we learn that Jack Campbell is quite the dissident in disguise. He has voided all civic nationalism from his worldview and replaced it with blood and soil. He appears like a normie to his employer and even at times to his wife, but at heart he knows that Ozzie is pretty much right about everything—even if the poor tosser is almost always wrong about what to do about it.

As Jack gets a handle on his time traveling abilities, his knowledge of English history comes to the fore. Most notable is his interview with Enoch Powell in 1974, six years past the statesman’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech. Jack attempts to persuade the old patriot to refocus on immigration, and focus less on distractions such as the Irish Question. He also tries to wean him off the good war myth of the Second World War. He gains the man’s trust by showing him his cell phone, with all its apps and cached news items of 2025. More impressed by the degeneration of his nation than by the dazzling technology, Enoch ultimately believes that Jack is from the future. If Jack can change Enoch Powell’s mind, could he possibly change history?

It takes Jack several trips back in time to even begin answering this question. Time travel, apparently, is complicated. Meanwhile, another atrocity rocks England as the press slowly and reluctantly reveals that knife-wielding Muslim terrorists had just slaughtered a number of children in Jack’s hometown of Newfordshire. With the recent stabbings in Southport on everyone’s mind, anger is brimming in Jack’s circle. Ozzie in particular is outraged and heads down to the quaint little hamlet with a carful of his mates in order to protest.

“Hey, we’re Englishmen,” he tells Jack. “We’re civilized. We’re not gonna riot. But we are gonna make our voices heard. We’re gonna stand our ground – because it is our ground. It’s our country damnit.” And since “civilized” is not exactly the first word one would use to describe a beautiful thug like Ozzie, it won’t take a prescient reader to get a feeling that something else really bad is going to happen in Newfordshire. Can Jack’s still-shaky time traveling techniques save the day? And will he be able to navigate through all the ominous sci-fi paradoxes that surprise him at every turn?

Britain on the Brink has a lot of things going for it. It’s an easy breezy read, the plot never lets up, and the two main characters never stop developing. Suspense and action balance nicely with introspection and emotion. Breakey has a knack for history, and believably reconstructs England from the past—the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s, mostly, but with references that go way back before that. He peppers his dialogue with cockney rhyming slang as well as a good deal of English wisecrackery. When Ozzie delivers it, it can be downright funny. My favorite:

Jack went straight to the point. “This is gonna sound crazy, but we’re going back in time, Ozzie.”

Scoff. “Pull the other one, mate. It’s got bells on.”

Breakey also has a sharp dissident mind, and places the right talking points in his dialogue and narration. It’s all there, from justifying British colonialism to highlighting British exceptionalism, from underscoring the savagery of non-whites to condemning the cowardice of the cucked British elite. Clearly, Breakey has kept up with dissident literature. The story is very British as well, with references galore to that island’s history. And it is relevant history, such as the HMT Empire Windrush or the 7/7 bombings, which the non-native reader might have to learn further about online. It must be said that Breakey for the most part skirts the Jewish Question, but he does address it at one point, albeit obliquely. This might work in his favor after all since Britain on the Brink will also serve very well as young adult literature—and we all know that the JQ may not the best thing to lead with when reaching out to young readers. And yes, there is a lot of swearing, but it’s not the tasteless, gratuitous kind; rather it’s just men being men, sounding off while their people and their nation are in peril. When the inveterately unfiltered Ozzie does it, you have to laugh:

Jack shook his head. He was accustomed to his posh life with Lily and the kids – nice house, fancy car, creature comforts. “I choose to remain a member of polite society. Associating with you is dangerous enough.” It was a small joke, but there was truth to it.

“There won’t be polite society in ten years.” said Ozzie, as if reading Jack’s mind.

“The media’s already talking about—”

“Fook the media, the bastards. They’re not reporters, they’re propagandists. Regime whores. Call ’em what they are.”

Britain on the Brink is part one in Breakey’s First World Adventures in Time and Space series, and if the title is any indication, time travel will play a large role in it—as well as, I hope, the sparkling interplay between Jack and Ozzie as they team up to save England and the West. One of the best things about the series, however, is that Breakey does not attempt to explain how Jack got his time travel powers to begin with. Instead, he describes it as a God-given gift. It’s as if the Almighty is looking out for the Brits because they’re on some kind of special path. No ethnic group, no race can thrive without the rock solid belief that they are loved by their Creator and are on some kind of special path. Fittingly, Breakey starts his novel with the following quote from the great colonialist Cecil Rhodes: “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

Jack may not feel this way in 2025, but in 1966 he cannot help but feel this way when his team of native-born Britons defeats West Germany in the World Cup, and 85,000 of his delirious countrymen join together in a rendition of “Rule, Britannia.”

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never will be slaves.

If Britain on the Brink imparts anything, it’s that the English—and indeed white people everywhere—can achieve this level of unity and identity once again.

Reposted from Counter-Currents, with permission.