The Browser - You Are The Somebody

A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Correspondence and criticism welcome: robert@thebrowser.com

This week: Novels about politics

First, an admission of my own carelessness, forgetfulness, stupidity, call it what you will — but how could I have written a letter last week about business and financial books without mentioning Michael Lewis?

My thanks to RP, who was first to point out this laughably gaping hole in my recommendations. Lewis's Liar's Poker (1989) is the classic among classics, the book that every investment banker reads and every financial journalist wishes they had written. The Big Short (2010) is not far behind. Like most of the rest of the world I keenly await Lewis's next book, about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

My thanks to BB and SS for recommending JR (1975), by William Gaddis. I have found the first hundred pages heavy going. JR is written almost entirely in the form of unattributed dialogue, leaving the reader to work out exactly what is going on. In that respect at least it makes me think me of Ulysses, a book that I started and abandoned several times before finally losing myself in Jim Norton's reading for Audible. So I will not give up on JR, but I have failed on this first attempt, and I will take time to regroup.

My thanks also to DJD for mentioning John Lanchester, and, in particular, Capital (2012), Lanchester's glorious novel about the financialisation of London. And I was particularly pleased when DY reminded me of James Buchan, whose Frozen Desire (1999) is the best (non-fiction) book ever written for the general reader about the nature of money and the idea of money. Buchan has also written a biography of John Law which finally gets the measure of that astonishing eighteenth-century adventurer, half-Rastignac and half-Rothschild, who fled a murder conviction in England, refinanced France's national debt with paper money of his own invention, organised the North American equivalent of the South Sea Bubble, fled his French creditors, and died a professional gambler in Venice. A fantasy novel in which Law returned from the grave to partner up with Sam Bankman-Fried is one that I would certainly read.  

But this is a week for political novels, novels which are primarily about the business of government and the people who govern. My thanks again to friends and readers for recommendations. Here is my short-list of books which have something original to say about politics and which say it in an interesting way. I may have left many good books out, but I have taken care not to let any bad books in:  

The Prime Minister, by Anthony Trollope (1876)
All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren (1947)
Advise And Consent, by Allen Drury (1959)
The Corridors Of Power, by C.P. Snow (1964)
House Of Cards, by Michael Dobbs (1989)
Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford (2010)
The Successor, by Ismail Kadare (2003)
The Just City, by Jo Walton (2015)
The Senility Of Vladimir P, by Michael Honig (2016)
Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld (2020)
M: Son Of The Century, by Antonio Scurati (2022)

Debatable omissions: I cannot get on with Gore Vidal's American novels, though RH speaks highly of his novel of antiquity, Julian. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy is a work of genius, but describing it as a "political novel" feels like a bit of a reach; likewise George Orwell's 1984; likewise Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy; likewise Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.  

My main reading this past week has been All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren; and Advise and Consent by Allen Drury.

I knew All The King's Men by reputation but I had never read it until prompted to do so by emails from JA, KB and JW, to whom I am now much indebted. Of Advise And Consent I had not even heard until RH and JA recommended it. Rarely have I been so happy to lose a night's sleep as I did (twice) this week when finishing first Warren and then Drury.

All The King's Men is based loosely on the rise of Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and US Senator from Louisiana from 1932 until his assassination in 1935. Long appears in the Warren's novel as Governor Willie Stark.

Warren's dialogue is always tight, but his atmospherics are sometimes a touch windy. It is the sort of prose you might get if you could engineer a collaboration between William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler. Here is a taste of it, in which Warren introduces a political fixer called Tiny Duffy, who will soon join Governor Stark's staff:

He didn't need any sign to let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough, and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw on the back of his head. There was a striped band on the hat.

And here is Stark himself, explaining later why he hired Duffy:

The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a night's sleep.

Warren portrays Stark as a relatively benign autocrat, a man who is interested in power more than money and who is uncorrupt by the standards of his time and place because he knows that bribes and backhanders always leave a trail of evidence which can eventually be used in blackmail. By the same token, he tolerates the corruption of others, the better to blackmail them in future.

Stark's populism is real enough. He builds roads and railways, schools and bridges. He regulates monopolies and raises taxes on big business. The state prospers as never before. But his price for all this is total control of his state's political system, which he gets and keeps through bullying and blackmail and abuse of executive power. Stark is that most difficult of dictators — the one who smiles, delivers, and makes reasonable people think that there is something to be said for dictatorship after all.  

I rank Advise And Consent, by Allen Drury, as the missing link between the British and American versions of House Of Cards, and the equal of both.

When House Of Cards crossed the pond from Westminster to Capitol Hill, and the fastidious Francis Urquhart was replaced by the glad-handing Frank Underwood, I thought Underwood must have sprung fully-formed from the minds of Netflix's show-runners. I see now that Underwood is the direct descendant of Senate Majority Leader Robert Munson, the fictional protagonist of Advise And Consent, who spends his 18-hour days charming, cajoling, chastising and strong-arming his fellow-Senators into doing what the president wants; which at the time in question is to confirm a new Secretary of State based loosely on Alger Hiss.

Advise And Consent captures America in the thick of the Cold War when the Soviet Union is at the peak of its prestige and has just launched Sputnik 1. I had previously thought of this period — the late 1950s — as a Golden Age for the Norman Rockwell version of America,  when wages were rising and cities were thriving and jobs were plentiful for white men and their families. I had not realised, until reading Advise And Consent, quite how far these achievements were offset and overshadowed for conservatives by the fear of Soviet communism.

Advise And Consent is a political novel in two senses. It is about politics, and it delivers a political message of its own. The political message is a warning to Americans against going soft on communism, and it is delivered a little more crudely and little more obviously than the dispassionate reader might wish. Here, for instance, is an oblique soliloquy from Drury's hero, Senator Robert Munson:  

In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others to be hated or loved according to their own cupidity, envy, and greed, or lack of it; rise and rise and rise and rise—and then, in the sudden burst of Soviet science in the later fifties, the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it, a too complacent and uncaring people awoke to find themselves naked with the winds of the world howling around their ears.

I think it was Proust who said that a work of art with a calculated message was like a work of art with its price-tag still attached; a purely aesthetic enjoyment was no longer possible. With Advise And Consent, I am inclined to forgive the moments of messaging, if only because they are the reason the book was written at all. The price-tag may still be on, but it is the right price-tag.

The Senility Of Vladimir P, by Michael Honig, is, you might say, The Death of Stalin without the death. Honig imagines Vladimir Putin twenty years on, descending into dementia and sidelined to his dacha outside Moscow.

Sometimes Putin hallucinates flashes of his past; sometimes he remembers vaguely what he once was; sometimes his anger and frustration overwhelm him and he must be sedated by his loyal nurse, Sheremetev.

Senility is a strangely beguiling book, not least as one slowly comes to realise that life in the Putin dacha is a microcosm of life in Russia itself. Everybody on the dacha's huge staff, save for honest Sheremetev, is quietly running some racket of their own. With little real work to do, and no effective oversight, the doctors and cleaners, guards and drivers, cooks and gardeners can devote their time and energy to embezzling the dacha's resources for their own private benefit.  

There is also something touching, even satisfying, about Honig's portrayal of this strangely diminished Putin who has lost his power, and is losing his mind, but who still retains much of his obnoxious personality. Perhaps this is Putin as one feels he should be, punished for his sins by something resembling providence.

When I first read Senility in 2016 I thought admiringly that Honig had devised something of a happy ending to the Putin problem, a best-case scenario in which Putin went quietly. Six years on, as Russia ravages Ukraine and Putin threatens nuclear war,  Honig's fantasy has come to seem both sentimental and irrelevant. But it is still a beautiful tale, and I am glad that I read it when I did.          

M: Son Of The Century, by Antonio Scurati, is an extraordinary work of reimagination, recounting the rise of Benito Mussolini in such intimate detail that one might as well be reading the newspapers of 1921 and 1922 if those newspapers had been written by a stylist of genius.

Scurati intends a trilogy, of which this first volume is available in an excellent English translation by Anne Milano Appel. The second has been published in the original Italian but not yet in an English translation. The third is still to come.

This first volume covers the period 1919-1924, during which Mussolini creates the Fascist movement, marches on Rome, bounces the King into appointing him prime minister, and lays the foundations of his dictatorship. I doubt there is a better book in existence for understanding the nature of fascism as Mussolini conceived it.

Mussolini's first Fascists are united not by ideology but by attitude. For the most part they are ex-soldiers disillusioned and embittered by the First World War. They are specialists in violence. Mussolini's stroke of genius, if you can call it that, is to see that their violence, properly organised and applied, will be enough to shatter Italy's fragile democracy. His Fascists operate more like a terrorist group than a political party, and deliberately so. They despise politics as such. Their sole aim is the seizure of power:

The theoretical problem of the political program is solved by eradicating it like an invasive weed: the fascists must only take action, any kind of action. Everything, then, becomes simpler.

M: Son Of The Century had me gripped throughout. It also disproved, for me, the assertion that "tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner". I finished it feeling that I understood Mussolini far better than I had ever done before; but the more clearly I saw him, the more terrifying and repugnant he showed himself to be.

The Just City, by Jo Walton (2015), is about politics in its most perfect form — the governance of a model city founded on the principles of Plato's Republic. The Just City wears its learning lightly: No prior knowledge of Plato is necessary; but the Republic and The Just City complement one another so well that, after reading Walton, you may well want to read Plato, which will be an added bonus.

The conceit of The Just City is that the goddess Athena collects students and followers of Plato and Platonism from the entirety of human history, and plonks them down in some Atlantean idyll beyond time and space where they can built Plato's ideal Republic — an austere paradise governed by a meritocratic elite where everybody knows their place.

These improbable beginnings are got deftly out of the way, the disparate new republicans forget their differences, and soon we are lost in the life of the Just City, discovering how Plato's philosophy fares when it collides with reality. The communal living and eating go well, the randomised mating and the centralised child-rearing a touch less so.

But the main emergent problem is one of social mobility: The Just City has put in place the three-level social hierarchy prescribed by Plato, with "guardians" at the top, warriors in the middle and workers at the bottom — but who guards the guardians themselves? Who chooses the guardians?

Plato could be surprisingly cynical when it came to matters of state. He saw that his guardians might need to bend a few truths and spread a few stories in order to inflate their mystique and perpetuate their own power. The guardians of the Just City follow his playbook, and they are close to getting away with it, when the goddess Athena drops a new citizen into their midst — a red-bearded and bare-footed man who claims to know nothing and who wants to question everything. Yes, it is Socrates. Once, Plato made use of his ideas. Now the tables are turned.

I had better force myself to pause there, lest I go on for another few thousand words. But perhaps a line or two next week about Red Plenty and The Successor, both of which I had meant to discuss here — Robert