The first page of The Alteration puts down in a seemingly archaic England, specifically at “Cathedral Basilica of St. George of Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas.” A king has died, other kings have assembled, and the protagonist Hubert Anvil, a young, prepubescent chorister, is delivering a transcendent performance. But it’s an odd configuration of kings in attendance, and soon other references start to nag. The cathedral contains frescoes by William Blake ... and a mosaic by one David Hockney. And then comes the twist, several pages in, as the massive cathedral disgorges its funeral procession: “In the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and seventy-six, Christendom would see nothing more mournful or more stately.”

That’s right: It’s 1976, and an alteration to history has, in fact, arrested history. The Protestant Reformation, it turns out, never took place. The Church of England never parted ways with the Pope, Catholicism dominates the Western world, and the Turks are branded as the enemy. (In this alternate reality, Martin Luther, the great papal critic, became Pope.) It’s supposed to be the year the Sex Pistols released “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but large portions of the planet are fixed in medieval deep freeze. Interestingly, there’s still something like a brash (if much diminished) New World, called “New England,” where there’s a “First Citizen” instead of a king. It’s a surreal setup, but then so was the episode of The Simpsons that imagined a reality star rising to the highest office.

The Alteration, then, is a counterfactual novel in the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. (Dick’s 1962 science-fiction classic, now reimagined an Amazon TV series, wonders what would have happened had the Nazis won World War II.) In fact, in a sly wink to Amis’s real-world readers, Hubert’s choir friends come into possession of a copy of The Man in the High Castle. Dick’s book, in the world of The Alteration, is an example of “CW”—or “Counterfeit World,” a literary subgenre of “Time Romance” (basically, science fiction). Such literature is illegal in Hubert’s world, and the youngsters duly marvel at their contraband. From it, they imagine an alternative world history that could very well have been theirs, one in which Martin Luther never becomes Pope, something called The Origin of Species sees its way into print, and New England eventually evolves into “the greatest Power in the world.” Here, then, is “fake history”—but unlike its mischief-making cousin “fake news,” fake history has the positive effect of opening minds muffled by oppression to unimagined social and political possibilities.

Amis’s seemingly benign title, The Alteration, however, has a second, terrible meaning: Hubert is himself to be “altered.” At the novel’s outset, church authorities resolve to turn the young chorister into a castrato, the better to embalm his otherworldly voice—and to refrigerate the adolescent in clean, bright, asexual youth. Traumatic surgery, here, is sheathed in the sort of opaque euphemism—see “alternative facts”—that politicians sometimes prefer, and that Orwell himself worried about in his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.”