Atlas Sucked

Definitely genuinely good and probably genuinely political (I think Edmund Wilson is wrong about this), how about Nabokov’s Bend Sinister? Or is it too old to be “out there”?

I imagine you’re aiming higher than this, but like Christopher Buckley’s humor. Not on the great books list, and therefore maybe not genuinelygood, but maybe plain old good.

Speaking of Conrad, how about The Secret Agent? What a wonderful book.

I’m finding the definition of “political novel” a bit slippery. Do we count Orwell? Brave New World? I find myself wanting to exclude allegories and speculative fiction. You mean to exclude satire, right? I might be prepared to make a case for Heller’s Good as Gold anyway.

How about Grapes of Wrath?

What about Ken McLeod? I thought the Fall Revolution series was pretty good, and it’s most definitely political.

plato’s republic.

I’m fond of two under-appreciated (at least in America) works of Czech fiction, War With the Newts by Karel Capek and The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. Newts might be a little too heavily allegorical at times, and Svejk probably would have benefitted from a bit of editing (Hasek died before its completion) but both to me stand as excellent pieces of literature and overtly political interventions.

There are many other novels that I’ve considered political – JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (after Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe ) and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion – that also consider to be expert examples of literary art.

But novels that explicitly advocate for a specific position, and approach politics from anything other than an oblique angle, are few and far between.

Think this might fall under your definition of a biased response, but:

# Charles Stross / Various
# China Miéville / Iron Council

Chris Lehmann’s essay on American political fiction is worth mentioning here. Generally, it’s pretty awful (think Primary Colors), but there are some standouts — Gore Vidal’s novels are mentioned, as well as a roman a clef about Lyndon Johnson called The Gay Place. Anybody read any of those?

A vote for Svejk.

Lanark by Alisdair Gray. James Kelman has wrote a couple as well (there’s the one written in officialese, which was rather brilliant). And Candide, obviously. And Pynchon’s last but one novel was heavily political. Passos’ USA trilogy. Hard Times by Dickens. This is off the top of my head, if I thought of it I could probably come up with some more.

Kafka?

Is it Zombie Paul Newman they have helping? I hope so.

If Svejk is political then Catch 22 certainly is too.

Drat. “Shelley”, of course.

I’ll probably be the thousandth one to think of, but I guess the first one to mention, Thomas M. Disch.

“Me too” to Svejk and The Secret Agent.

How about Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly?

Staying with the Russians: “Petty Devils” (I think the English title is) by Dosteyevsky, and almost anything by Andray Platonov (But the most overtly political would probably be “The Foundation Pit” and “Chevengur”).

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Orwell obviously: 1984 and Animal Farm.

If we’re counting war books then All Quiet on the Western Front also.

The first two thirds of Larry Beinhart’s “American Hero” is pretty good. It was butchered in the translation to film as “Wag The Dog.”

I also enjoyed (likely out of print now) Hurd and Osmond’s early 1970s “Scotch On The Rocks” about a fictitional Scottish national liberation struggle (adapted by the BBC).

“The Master And Margarita” is stunning.

Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name

Josef Skvorecky’s Lieutenant Boruvka stories are mysteries in which many of the crimes would not exist except for conditions in communist Czechoslovakia.

I don’t know if Ellison’s Invisible Man counts as a political novel, but it is certainly one of the masterpieces of American fiction. I’ll second the USA Trilogy and Svejk; it’s been too long since I read War of the Newts to remember if I thought it was a genuinely good novel. Ditto Native Son, but I remember thinking 15 years ago that it was very good.

Some of the best political satire was produced in the waning years of the Soviet Union. I’m thinking of works like Znoviev’s Yawning Abyss, which is something like a Slavic version of Brazil.

Robert Coover’s Public Burning, surely. Also, Pynchon’s criminally underrated Vineland.

Wyndham Lewis’s ‘The Revenge for Love’?

(Which is also one of the better titles for a novel).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3612/is_199901/ai_n8833048/

Under Western Eyes

I’m all populist and shit, but Nader’s thesis doesn’t seem so bad to me. Nice to have a backup plan. Once you fully accept the worthlessness of the Democratic Party, every Hail Mary looks good.

The British do more political satire than this side of the pond/south of Canada: A Very British Coup, House of Cards, Le Carre’s classics are about office politics as much as espionage. Heck, Terry Pratchett has increasingly worked political satire in with social satire. But I think Henry wanted novels advocating a political action or movement, not anything that includes political issues or politics as plot points. Not just “Don’t let this go on,” but “If that bothers you, do this instead”. A well-plotted, well-written use-case for a manifesto, and worth reading, not just enduring. Some good suggestions upthread, but I can’t think of recent ones that fit.

Of course, Illuminatus! also skewers Rand, with one of the characters writing a turgid political novel called Telemachus Sneezed, which features a 100 page monologue by a metacharacter named John Guilt.

Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.

I’m a great admirer of this wild and wooly work but I’m not sure it qualifies as a great novel, at least if we are being conservative about the definition of a novel.

Which does not mean that people shouldn’t read it. I spent a quite pleasant spring break in high school smoking dope and reading this amazingly amusing doorstop.

I always remember the way the novel detourned the Young Americans for Freedom slogan, “Immanentize the Eschaton” into a subversive phrase.

And in the spirit of the Platonov suggestion, another: Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. Again, though, its political import it more implicit than explicit.

Phineas Phinn, The Prime Minister, and Phineas Redux, by Anthony Trollope.

Someone mentioned A Scanner Darkly. I’d add Radio Free Albemuth as another political Philip K Dick novel.

I think “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us” sounds like the title of a book he’d write.

LeGuin, IMHO, qualifies for the Nobel Prize: “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Meaning, a work of *moral* fiction, about how humans should live. If you’re talking about groups larger than a family, that’s a political novel, ISTM. Books where politics and political/moral principles are discussed and acted out, whether in the “Real World” or in imagination, seem to me to be political novels. So I’d say:

John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar; The Sheep Look Up; The Shockwave Rider.
Heinlein: all of it.
Rushdie: Midnight’s Children. The Satanic Verses.
Theodore Judson: Fitpatrick’s War.
George RR Martin: The Game of Ice and Fire, but it’s pretty old-fashioned politics.
Neal Stephenson: Ananthem, though that’s more a novel of philosophy than of politics per se.

Most Victor Serge qualifies, as Serge’s novels are like Balzac, a series of interconnected stories. Each book may be read on its own, but they begin before the Russian Revolution to the Stalinist takeover to the despair of the independent left during the late 1930s through the 1940s.

Also, Ignacio Silone’s Fortamara, Bread & Wine, the Seed Beneath the Snow, among others.

Vidal’s American history novels are highly politically charged, starting with Washington DC, which is about the rise of the national security state and the triumph of celebrity over substance in politics.

The Great Midland, by Alexander Saxton, which I’m just finishing, has been astonishing. It is about communist union organizers in the early to mid-20th Century in the Chicago area.

For those of a more American classical bent, Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, and Grapes of Wrath, of course. Jack London’s The Iron Heel.

Just for contraries, Andy et al having covered most of what occurs immediately, James Earl Carter’s The Hornet’s Nest is a wonderfully evocative novelization of the historical record of the US war for independence. Which is sort of ur-political.
Plus if PKD and John Brunner get in Cordwainer Smith should be there as well.
And now he is.

Two (at least) of D’Israeli’s novels: Coningsby (about politics) and Sybil (a call to action); maybe others, but these are the only two I’ve read.

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: not of high literary quality, but an amazingly plausible and attractive portrait of the good — and sustainable — life.

Bellamy’s Looking Backwards. Just kidding.

I’ll throw in an additional vote for Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and We. There are some smart passages about politics in The Last Hurrah, but I found it an incredibly dull novel overall. I’ve seen The Blithedale Romance referred to as a political novel and while I’m not quite sure it makes it into that category, it’s worth reading anyway.

Ross Thomas worked in the mystery and espionage genre, but many of his books deal with the nuts and bolts of politics from the point of view of an insider. Seersucker Whipsaw deals with electioneering in West Africa; a couple of American political operatives work for a local tribal leader. Yellow Dog Contract is about an embattled union. The Fools in Town are on Our Side is about an election campaign in the U.S.

Frederik Pohl is as relentlessly political as Ursula LeGuin, most conspicuously in The Space Merchants. Stanislaw Lem deserves mention, although he mostly expresses an outsider’s perspective on a foreign political system, like a great many authors previously mentioned. I highly recommend The Chain of Chance and Return from the Stars just for the way they make the quotidian exotic.

Dickens already got a mention, but, like Twain, his books are almost always somewhat political.

Doris Lessing.

Dostevesky’s Demons

Guiseppe Tomassi Lampedusa – “The Leopard”
Carlo Levi – “Christ Stopped at Eboli”

I’ll vote for

Conrad: Under Western Eyes
Vonnegut: Jailbird

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books is an extraordinary book, first published in 1981 and still barely known in the US. It’s a brilliantly intense, naturalistic, working-class bildungsroman set in and around the city of Glasgow (Books 2 and 3), embedded in a dystopian fantasy set in and around the obsolescent (and soon-to-be-“swallowed”) city of Unthank (Books 1 and 4).

In short: the character called Lanark is the struggling reincarnation of the art student Duncan Thaw, dead of suicide at the age of 23 and now almost literally going through hell. But if Unthank is a kind of hell, then it’s a strangely recognisable one, in which capital, politics, bureaucracy, big medicine and the media are still virulently and voraciously alive.

In the Epilogue, which comes halfway through, the author addresses his protagonist as follows:

“You [Lanark] are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy.”

and:

“The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason.”

Recommended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanark:_A_Life_in_Four_Books

The Edward Upward trilogy.

90:Spent some time at Amazon, and Ward Just looks like the real deal, if the topic is books about politics, narrowly construed. I want to read him.

I don’t think these have been mentioned yet, unless in the last 10 minutes or so (apologies if they have been):
1) The First Circle (Solzhenitysn) — read it a long long time ago, so recollection is hazy (but I think I liked it).
2) Guerrillas (Naipaul) — sort of repellent politics (or very repellent, depending on your point of view), but superbly written. He deserved his Nobel prize on the strength of this book alone, or so I would argue.
3) A Flag for Sunrise (Robert Stone) — not everyone’s cup of tea; I think it is very good, occasionally a little overwritten.

oh, and then there’s roth’s “american pastoral.”

Leonard Wibberly’s The Mouse That Roared.

Another interesting utopia is “Voyage from Yesteryear” by James P Hogan (who is also a quirky author in the Heinlein mold), which describes a fascinating alternate society where money is replaced by expertise, with a plot involving a future American fascist government spaceship arriving at that society, and the ensuing revolution… I am not sure if its a tribute to Heinlein or an unconscious parallel, but with Heinlein’s libertarianism replaced with something else, that is unique, and which is hard to find flaws in. But a utopia. It’s a great book to cheer yourself up with.

It’s also a bloody awful piece of writing.

Comments in three figures and yet my Find function fails to detect The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which really is a great political novel. And I’ll second The Case of Comrade Tulayev (and for that matter, Darkness At Noon).

Vargas Llosa: Death in the Andes, but also many of his other works.

Sara Paretsky: Crime with the background of contemporary (Illinois) politics.

Swift: Gullivers Travels

Guareschi: Stories of Don Camillo

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Erskine Childers ‘ The Riddle of the Sands, a marvelous story that directly influenced Britain’s preparations for war with Germany prior to WWI.

Oh, and Don Camillo is politics for people who know, just know that socialism is against human nature.

Bleak House and Little Dorrit.

Glad to see that someone (correctly) mentioned Chandler, whom I like, but one might also mention the early, and very bloody but very Western US political, novels of Dashiell Hammett, whom I don’t much like.

And to continue my one person crusade, does anyone really think that Animal Farm and 1984 are good as novels? Strictly sources for 10th grade English essays as far as I’m concerned.

George Eliot was a good reference; Elizabeth Gaskell might also be mentioned. And, although his politics are a little remote, Walter Scott.

Cards of Identity, by Nigel Dennis.

I would call The Master and Margarita an anti-political novel — a cry of agony at being trapped in a society where politics are compulsory. And from which the author can’t even imagine any escape but death.

If we are talking about mysteries — good, rereadable mysteries — from a left-wing stance, let me remind you of Rex Stout. And Sjowall and Wahloo (sorry abnout the diacritics, I can’t be botehred to hunt the codes down at the moment.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The “epilogue” at the end feels out-of-place, but that’s a minor flaw. It’s still a brilliant book. In spite of being written more than two decades ago, it has held up incredibly well. For that matter, every time James Dobson opens his mouth, it seems more and more timely.

Interesting how many go either to Great 20th-Century Isms or to science fiction.

Keep in mind, for a large fraction of the internet, “fiction” just means “science fiction”.

For the various people who’ve mentioned Darkness and Noon, really have to reiterate my recommendation of Life and Fate, which maybe is the great Soviet novel.

Pitkin @118 wrote: “Keep in mind, for a large fraction of the internet, ‘fiction’ just means ‘science fiction’.”

The fact that we’re recommending SF isn’t necessarily proof that we don’t read anything else. I suppose I could have recommended Felix Holt, but I should think it has little relevance to present-day politics. (I don’t think you’re going to find anyone today arguing against the secret ballot, as Eliot was doing.) So we’re left with depictions of present-day politics (which many of us find grim and unappealing) or speculation about possible utopias, dystopias, alternate histories, etcetera, all of which have direct relevance to the question, “Where do we go from here?” Political debate takes form as science fiction — as it does in Atlas Shrugged.

O’Grady @ 110 — Never could get past a few pages of Hammett, but Chandler’s spare sentences deepen and ripen every time I reread him.

B Traven. The Death Ship is about as political as it gets.
Katherine Anne Porter. Ship of Fools has to qualify on some level, but haven’t looked at it in 25 years.

Concur above that Pynchon’s Vineland is underrated and deals directly with this territory, “narrowly construed” as bob mcmanus put it.

Well if we’re going to post critiques here, can I just say that All the King’s Men is a pretty bad novel? Because it is. Most of it consists of grindingly tedious navel-gazing by the narrator. Warren looooves the sound of his own voice, that much is clear.

And it’s not especially political, either; you could make a case that ol’ Jack’s gradual re-engagement with the world is a political process, but if we’re thinking THAT broadly, then it seems as though you could make a case for almost ANY novel being political, and let’s face it, that’s not what people are thinking about when they call AtKM “political:” they’re thinking of Willie Stark, who barely emerges as a character and whose only purpose is to serve as one of several foils for Jack’s interminable maundering.

If we’re talking Russia, Dead Souls is not to be missed.

From SF I’d cast a vote for The Stars My Destination, as Bester definitely made a point with Gully Foyle.

“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” has already been mentioned.

How about Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”?

Sholokov!

One more vote for Ward Just, whose fiction isn’t political in itself but does a tremendous job of getting into heads of politicians. At the risk of coming off as self-dealing, here’s a piece of mine on the two editions of Just’s story collection “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert”:

http://thesecondpass.com/?p=1955

Ok, ok, you got most of them: Dickens and Penn Warren, Vidal and Conrad ( especially The Secret Agent or Under Western Eyes), Kapek and Lem and Hayek. How about a minor Russian Classic, Voinovich’s The Fur Hat.

Less in the mode of dystopian SF satire of actually existing politics, many of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune books are speculative exploration of other possible political systems — as is Dune itself, I guess, with its theocratic ecotarky, though it’s a bit buried these days in the rubble of the rest of the cash cow the series became. The two Bureau of Sabotage books — Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment — are terrific portraits of multicultural negotiation between mutually alien communities in uneasy federation; the latter has a very funny courtroom drama set in a justice system that is highly advanced and sophisticated and utterly inhuman.

Samuel Delany’s Triton (aka Trouble on Triton) is a “reply novel” to Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” — the politics is more by way of backdrop I suppose, though the idea of the “Unlicensed Zone” is strong and interesting.

Peter Hoeg’s “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow” is — as backdrop to a borderline SF thriller — a satire on intellectual arrogance as the spine (cause or effect) of both colonialism and its overthrow: the kind of territory emerson, mcmanus and seth edenbaum angrily stalk.

Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

All of Ishmael Reed: Pynchon starts here really…

T.H.White’s The Once and Future King is a very English exploration of why democracy and mutual niceness would be an improvement on maurauding robber barons and the war of all against all, and ewhat will proobably undermine it (=human nature) — it’s as sappy as that in a way, as dated and as class-and-culture-bound as a film like Brief Encounter, but a good snapshot of the utopias and delusions of a lost age. (Plus, you know, JOUSTING!)

The Comedians, Graham Greene.

Is nobody going to mention the political novels of Trollope, incidentally? (Can you Forgive Her*? etc.). He actually knew the world of nuts and bolts politics well, and once stood for parliament.

Or, to get even more onto the nuts and bolts of politics, what about Disraeli’s novels? Again I haven’t read them myself (and I’ve read quite a bit of 19th century fiction so perhaps that’s significant) but he was Prime Minister for God’s sake.

It seems to me that there are two definitions of the phrase ‘political novel’ being played with here: novels about ‘politics’ where politics is defined as being ‘the way in which we structure and order our lives through a political or quasi-political process” in which case almost every novel is political, and ‘novels about the nuts and bolts of politics as it is actually practiced in the real world’. As most novelists have very little experience of the latter, there are far fewer of these and their literary merit tends to be lower.

The problem here would seem to be the conflation of the two genres, and not comparing like with like. Nader’s novel may be awful (it probably is) but it’s interesting simply because he is a practical politician and has inside experience of politics denied to outsiders like George Orwell or Graham Greene, even though these last two are, obviously, far more talented.

*Or ‘Can You Finish it?’ as Stephen King once called it.

Someone mentioned Disraeli too. Other than that you’re right.

Ignatius Donnelly still has three books in print after a century. Atlantis, Bacon as Shakespeare, and dystopia — he’s pretty ancestral. Perhaps “Ragnorak” will be revived too, or his white-man-waking -up-as-a-black-man novel.

Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit.

‘Someone mentioned Disraeli too. Other than that you’re right.’

Your ‘Find’ option in IE is obviously superior to mine.

Fritz Leiber’s A Spectre is Haunting Texas is the opposite of turgid.
Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron
Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War

Vonnegut is patchy but when he’s on it he’s great.

Apart from Disraeli and maybe Havel, tho he did it in the wrong order, who’s been a frontrank politician as well as a better-than-mid-rank novelist? It always makes me think of P.D. James’s poet-policeman Adam Dalgleish: I don’t dislike James’s books but surely Dalgleish’s poetry totally sucks.

Jonathan Franzen’s The 27th City. Way better than The Corrections. It’s a sort of conspiracy story about big-city (well, St, Louis) urban politics. He gives the impression of understanding the thinking of real estate developers and their interlocutors in government quite well. The big climax is even a local referendum!

there are two definitions of the phrase ‘political novel’ being played with here: novels about ‘politics’ where politics is defined as being ‘the way in which we structure and order our lives through a political or quasi-political process’’ in which case almost every novel is political, and ‘novels about the nuts and bolts of politics as it is actually practiced in the real world’. As most novelists have very little experience of the latter, there are far fewer of these and their literary merit tends to be lower.

Right, exactly. The Corrections is one of the very few contemporary good ones I can think of that falls in the latter category. (It’s really puzzling that there aren’t more. Practical politics is, compared with most areas of contemporary life, full of conflict, strong emotions, major decisions, etc.) But there is also a third definition, novels written to advance a particular political position or vision. Atlas Shrugged probably (it’s a long time since I tried to read it) fits that definition better than either of the first two.

There would surely be a long list of novelists who’ve stood for office and failed? I’ll kick off with Upton Sinclair and Norman Mailer.

Haldeman’s The Forever War was heavily used in the Alan Moore/Ian Gibson series The Ballad of Halo Jones. (Indeed if we’re looking for political graphic novels, Moore’s Watchmen would be a good place to start.)

Mph, Watchmen is a good place to start re political comics provided we immediately move on somewhere better — ie almost anywhere. *Clambers onto demented internet hobbyhorse*

Cerebus is a better place. Mid-period Cerebus. Before the really really tiny writing and the explanation why all women evah are evil marxist muslims.

… or no, he’s more on ejh’s “stood for office and failed” list.

He made a serious run for presidnet of Peru in 1990 — nearly won IIRC.

why doesn’t anyone writing fiction now seem to want to be the new Dickens or Tolstoy or Balzac?

Right now I’m reading Conspirators by Michael Andre Bernstein, someone very clearly rooted in the 19th-c realist tradition, but it’s a historical novel(set in 1910s Galicia). It has politics—capitalists and communists and marriage, so far! It’s been almost strange to recognize the pacing of such an earlier tradition, done so entirely without cutesiness (which I felt marred for example Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell). I only wish I could find more novels that dealt so intelligently and seriously with contemporary life. Smart, self-aware writers perhaps worry that the realist style of exposition, melodrama, and detail sketches will mark them as pretentious or doom their books in the market. There’s the whole omniscient narrative eye (and its ironic glance) that might be problematic for the contemporary setting, as well.

A search for politican novelist offers Dobrica Cosic and Justin M’Carthy.

I’m going to make a very bold – yet I think correct – claim here: not only are there very few political novels, there are no political novels at all. I would argue that novels are an explicitly anti-political genre, and (an even more bold claim here): might have been intentionally designed by the initiators of the genre to exclude politics.

First, “novels about ‘politics’ where politics is defined as being ‘the way in which we structure and order our lives through a political or quasi-political process’’ in which case almost every novel is political” – that is not politics (or, conversely, it’s so broad that almost everything is political, which means that definition is effectively useless). A political novel would be about politics itself – i.e. about explicit politics, politicians, statesman, policy decisions and so on.

Look at the genres that the novel competed against in it’s first days – drama and poetry. There’s no difficulty in naming a political drama: the first play we have (Aeschylus’ Persians) is undoubtedly about politics and most tragic plays until the advent of the novel are explicitly about notable political figures. There’s no difficulty in naming a political poem: until the advent of the novel, a huge number of the epic poems we have are explicitly about political figures doing political things.

I’m going to make a very bold – yet I think correct – claim here: not only are there very few political novels, there are no political novels at all. … A political novel would be about politics itself – i.e. about explicit politics, politicians, statesman, policy decisions and so on.

So, there are no novels about politicians or politics at all. None — good, bad or indifferent.

Uh huh.

Unfortunately I was not able to post my thought earlier in the thread, but I think it has been amply illustrated by various comments: the problem with citing science fiction (or speculative fiction) as political literature is that no Serious Person(tm) accepts that science fiction IS literature. Unless the author engages in 30 years of mainstreaming (LeGuin), but even after that one hint of technology or scientific/social complexity and the work is back on the juvenile shelves. Regardless of its quality or insight in any absolute sense (to the extent that such a judgment can be made).

Cranky

the problem with citing science fiction (or speculative fiction) as political literature is that no Serious Personâ„¢ accepts that science fiction IS literature. Unless the author engages in 30 years of mainstreaming (LeGuin), but even after that one hint of technology or scientific/social complexity and the work is back on the juvenile shelves

Look, I enjoy sf as much as anyone. But the notion that it has a monopoly on “social complexity” is a perfect example of the blinkers that I was snarking at in 119.

Admirers of the late Raymond Williams might like to know that I attended a lecture he gave not very long before his death – it may even have been his last lecture for all I know – in which he suggested that there was only really one socialist novel, that being The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. (It was far too long ago to remember his precise argument, but it may have been that other novels may have been written by socialists and may have offered critiques of existing society, but Tressell’s was explicitly about replacing that society with a socialist one.)

> But the notion that it has a monopoly on “social complexity” is a
> perfect example of the blinkers that I was snarking at in 119.

Please point in in detail, with exact quotes, where I stated that science fiction has a “monopoly” on involving concepts of social complexity. Because if you cannot, and I did not, then IMHO you have reinforced my point.

Which isn’t to say that most, or even very much, science fiction is any good. Other than GRRM and LeGuin I haven’t really read much of same for 20 years (excepting some adventure-trash, e.g. Sterling, for pure airport amusement). Still, the relegation to the ghetto sweeps up the good as well as the bad.

Cranky

Henry: “Doesn’t William James have a hypothetical somewhere that is more or less identical to Le Guin’s?”

Yes indeed. The subtitle of the story, in fact, is “Variations on a theme by William James”. Details, including quotes from Le Guin and James, at the Wikipedia entry.

Regarding the categories outline above, I think there’s a category in between “the way in which we structure and order our lives through a political or quasi-political process’’ which is overly broad as pointed out, and a novel about politicians, elections and so forth. Think about the “novel of ideas,” tradition, where characters are grappling with different visions of the world, including political outlooks – it’s not aimed at convincing readers a la Ayn Rand, or say, something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a different tradition, but it’s interested in staging the debates.

The Golden Notebooks would be a great novel in that vein – there’s a bit of petition-signing, but it’s mostly about politics as experience.

Now all Henry has to do is edit this all into a reading list for his new course on “Politics in the Novel…”

“Ah right, no true Scotsman. Of course you haven’t read The Mandarins or The 27th City or Jules Valles’ The Insurgent but you can assure me that my impression that they were about politics as politics must be mistaken. But then, I suppose it’s not necessary to know anything about particular novels if you know all about the genre itself.”

The problem is that we’re struggling to find political novels – you managed to namecheck 3 or 4 fairly obscure items. But let’s compare the novel to the tragic drama: if you ask people what plays they know, they’ll probably mention Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, Oresteia, Phedre, Threepenny Opera and the like. All of these (except for Threepenny Opera) are about explicitly political figures doing politics. It’s not only not hard to find a political play, most of the major examples are very political, it’s harder to avoid politics than to find it. Similarly, if we compare the novel to the epic poem: if you ask people what epic poems they know, they’ll mention Iliad, Aeneid, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Gilgamesh, Beowulf and so on. Many of these are about explicitly political figures as well doing explicit politics.

In fact, even during an era when the novel has struggled to even begin to take baby steps on politics, two of the leading playwrights of the twentieth century – Brecht and Shaw – produced bodies of work that are heavily and explicitly political (both of them to the point that their plays often feature kings, princes, politicians, armaments manufacturers, members of parliaments and so on).

if you ask people what plays they know, they’ll probably mention Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, Oresteia, Phedre, Threepenny Opera and the like

With the exception of the first of these, I very much doubt it.

I agree on LeGuin. And I think sf authors often explore political issues well. I see The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has been brought up at least 3 times already. I love that book and have read it about 20 times (even though it’s sexist, etc). I wouldn’t call it a really good novel, though. The writing is pretty stilted. But the ideas…

I am happy to include sf in the ranks of great literature when it is great, and pull some of the ‘classics’ out – I sure wouldn’t call Middlemarch good writing, it bored me to sleep over and over.

Barbara Kingsolver is a great writer and political, but her stories aren’t about poli sci politics. I loved Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, but I’m not sure it qualifies as great writing.

Here are some I’d nominate:
LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest
Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean
Frances Temple, A Taste of Salt (about Haiti, young adult)

The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault

@185: I agree that Burger’s Daughter is pretty good (though I read it a long time ago). I totally disagree with you about Middlemarch, and I think you are in a very small minority.

Oooh, The Monkeywrench Gang, good call!

If we’re thinking of political novel as a category defined — as the original post suggests — by Atlas Shrugged and Only the Super-Rich as core instances, then Monkeywrench is a perfect example. And while I’m not sure it’s a good book, exactly — it’s been almost 20 years since I read it — I am sure it’s much better than either of those.

I tend to think of politics, at least in the modern era, as primarily being about the balance of differing worldviews in the common population, and the exploitation of these worldviews by political actors. So any work of fiction which has a strong effect of changing the worldviews of a large part of the population will be important in shaping future politics. And of course worldviews are strongly affected by religion, and ethnic identities. So any work which has a nontrivial effect on the balance of the zeitgeist concerning any of these subjects, is inherently political. Sometimes this is by design, but oftentimes the zeitgeist influence is a nearly accidental result of the storytelling.

Because I’m duscussing the balance of competing worldviews among the public, I think the most commonly consumed forms of fiction will have the most influence. These are rarely the works (or even media) that us eggheads would regard as most worthy. So I nominate movies, and TV series (possibly even comic books). Long running franchises, such as Star Trek are probably near the top, as a definite sort of worldview tends has been promoted, and they’ve been such a large part of the entertainment/culutural landscape for decades.

A final nomination: all of John Berger’s novels, particularly G and the Into Their Labours trilogy.

“Anyone who told a story and had something to say that varied form their family history and psychological hangups was deemed mere entertainment and not worth considering.”

This, sadly, is exactly right.

Ignoring the entirety of offerings above that are less than fifty years old, I am left wondering how many examples of works that are, and have been, deemed “serious” literature it would take to convince Keith and Andy that they are wrong. Not to say, sadly, silly.

No mention yet of Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, or the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers [Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope]. Am I the first to mention de Sade or Rabelais? Prize, please./colbert

We Americans have left too much undone. We don’t have the republic we should have. As nice as it would be to have a comprehensive explanation, it would be considerably more satisfying to have a competent polity, a decent pay for a day’s work, color blind and collar blind.

The stories I want to read haven’t been written yet.

Er, Hamlet is about dynastic succession and the requirements of public life; of course it is political.

Coming back to Trollope, what’s different about his novels compared to most of those mentioned above is that they are about political life, rather than politics. That is, Trollope’s political novels are about politics in the same way that the Barchester novels are about religion.

The only policy proposal that excites Palliser is decimal currency and (as happened in reality a century later) he is torn between the pound and the shilling and penny (UK kept the pound and brought in a new penny worth 2.4 old ones, Australia turned pennies into cents (roughly speaking) making a shilling worth ten cents, and turning the pound into two dollars).

“Pynchon starts with Reed’ is a flippant reference to a joke TP makes himself, I think in the Rose Ballroom sequence of Gravity’s Rainbow. My copy of GR has devolved to unsorted looseleaf pages kept in a baggie so I’m not going to try and look it up.

Walt at 201 is correct: and of course any attempt to limit the definition of politics is itself a political act blah blah zzz (that’s code for “a truism which is nevertheless true”). To stay in reach of Ishmael Reed: you can’t draw a line between Elijah Muhammad and Sun Ra, even though they believe and declare sharply different things.

“Conspiracy theory thrillers are also often political (perhaps, a conspiracy theory is necessarily political). ”

No, actually they’re usually quite un-political. Oh, there’s a pretence of the conspiracy being something about politics, but it’s revealing that in most of conspiracy thrillers the actual politics of the conspiracy is either left entirely undescribed (the conspirators are just childishly labeled as bad men) or, if it is described, the politics of the conspiracy are so bizarre, inane or just offensive (especially since a lot of the thriller writers are either political naifs or worse, fascisti) that readers usually politely ignore those portions of the works.

Are there any goddamn books that aren’t political?

I say, the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.

Prove me wrong, someone.

“Why — do they shut Me out of Heaven?
Did I sing — too loud?” = political

John you are wrong QED.

There’s a goddamn vole in my house. They’re normally outside creatures and have no fear of man. The one I have is downright friendly.

I think Burittoboy has a point. Still, social commentary (and/or social satire) is almost always present and that is very close to politics. Again, consider Catch22 with its M&M Enterprises and all the rest. “What’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country.” “Contract is a contract, that’s what we’re fighting for.” (quoting from memory). Is this not, at least in part, about politics?

Must be that Slavoj. What an asshole.

Burritoboy’s argument runs something like this: novels don’t suit politics because politics does not suit the novel. He has made his stand, but it’s completely uninteresting because any counterexample you can offer he’ll dismiss as not really about politics. Even Primary Colors he would reject.

He also seems to think that politics is all about speeches (“A novel which really was about politics would be a series of political speeches interspersed with some more personal conversations”) which is about the least productive and least interesting part of politics, so even if you managed to convince him there is a novel that adheres to his criteria it would be bloody pointless to the rest of us.

‘I think Hamlet can be quite political: a strong theme within it is the corruption of the court. ‘

Almost all of Shakespeare’s drama are deeply ‘political’, although not the sort of ‘political’ that CT readers tend to like.

“Kennis van die Aand” (“Looking on Darkness” in translation) by Andre Brink was the first Afrikaans novel to be banned in the apartheid regime. It was genuinely political and it tried very hard to be literature, though I found it unconvincing. However it was very effective politically, so weaknesses as literature are easily forgiven.

“The muzzled muse: literature and censorship in South Africa”, Margreet de Lange, is a good read on the subject.

@204, belle le triste: Page 588. The chapter involves Lyle Bland’s connections to the Masons and proceeds in Pynchon’s usual fashion, not the least being the anachronism of referring to Reed’s own explorations of Masonism (given that Reed would have been all of eight or younger at the time). The Roseland Ballroom sequence takes place much earlier, involving the harmonica, (the future) Malcom X and a young JFK.

My original copy, given to me in 1973, is pretty shabby from numerous readings and long road trips, but not quite in an unbound state.

oh, and I agree with Sue, “Burger’s Daughter” by Gordimer, is a strong candidate.

“It would have suited the politics and the sensibility of the book better if he’d left the deaths and the phenomenon they found entirely unexplained”

Maybe. But it’s a bit tricky all round: since Smilla’s unique talent is her half-Inuit
background and knowledge of Greenland, the McGuffin has to be somewhere near,
or at least similar to, Greenland. But (having just read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”)
there isn’t much of value there to motivate a murderous conspiracy. Hoeg really
wrote himself into a tight corner. Though since he emerged with a bestseller and a
Hollywood movie, the joke’s on us.

who’s been a frontrank politician as well as a better-than-mid-rank novelist?

Michael Ignatieff?

Burrito’s comments are a perfect example of the Contrarian Two-Step.

He starts with the breathtaking announcement: “I’m going to make a very bold – yet I think correct – claim here: not only are there very few political novels, there are no political novels at all.” But when this bold — and incorrect — claim is challenged, it quickly deflates to the much less bold — but correct, or at least defensible — claim that politics is less central to the novel than to many earlier forms of literature.

Burritoboy, what you need to realize is you’re talking here to a bunch of people who are as smart as you, have read stuff you haven’t (just as you’ve read stuff I or Henry or whoever hasn’t), and who’ve thought about this stuff as much as you. You are not going to come up with the one profound insight that all of us have overlooked that destroys the whole premise of the conversation. And by trying to, you turn what otherwise could be useful contributions into pompous windbaggery.

Being There, plagiarism or no.

I feel Michael Ignatieff’s novels are the conclusive damning evidence of something

Michael Ignatieff’s existence?

Three hundred years, tens of thousands of authors, perhaps hundreds of thousands of books…….and out of that, we get Primary Colors?

People are trying and failing to discover what kind of Scotsman you’re weeding out. Primary Colors was mentioned not as a fine novel but an attempt to grapple with whatever stupid scale you’re devising.

Trollope’s Barchester novels, like all his novels, are political. In the case of Barchester the politics of religion, from John Bold’s attack on the Hiram’s Hospital to the Proudie anti-Proudie parties of the rest of them. The same is true, I think, for his “The Way We Live Now,” which contains both brilliant dyspeptic discussions of formal politics to say nothing of the literary politics, the politics of social standing politics of family life, and the politics of money.

I would also nominate Fallada’s “Little Man, What Now” and “Every Man Dies Alone” as great political novels; even though the former is supposed to be a “social novel”; it is as much an rumination on the politics of the alienation of modern Germany as anything else and the latter is a brilliant argument about the futility and necessity of revolt in a totalitarian world.

In a more general way, I would argue that “Atlas Shrugged” is an extraordinarily a badly written exposition of a really loopy political philosophy and would suggest that Camus’ “The Plague” is an extraordinarily well written exposition of a fine political philosophy. The same, I think, is true of “The Stranger.” Although not nearly as well done, Sartre’s “Nausea” is political and very interesting, while his “Iron in the Soul” is a perfectly decent political novel. Both capture a fundamental truth about French political life with the latter illuminating weird political world of pre-War France where, as one intellectual put it, one had to “hate France” to show one’s “love” for it.

Rand adored H. L. Mencken, at least at one point.

Sigh. I think the idea is to mention authors whose novels (i) qualify as Good Literature in the commenter’s view and (ii) are more political than the average (for authors whose novels are Good Literature), to the point of being an outlier.

Until burritoboy offers an argument for why all future novels must be apolitical, no matter the intentions of the author, there’s not much to discuss here.

Admittedly I did thoroughly enjoy the comment, apparently made sincerely, that political novels revolve around unrealistically romantic characterizations of politicians and politics, unlike political plays. Well, wow. Allow me to introduce you to Henry V. Or Hamlet. Or Oedipus Rex. Or…

Has anyone mentioned Vargas Llosa? Conversation in the Cathedral is a great political novel. Panteleone and the Visitors too.

Fuentes? The Death of Artemio Cruz is a brilliant political novel.

Encyclopedia Brown. The whole series.

Sherlocks Holmes. Jane Austen Choderlos de Laclos. Donald Barthelme. The Little Prince. Alice in Wonderland. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Baron Munchhausen.

I didn’t like the ending of Miss Smilla either. It’s a common fault of conspiracy thrillers that, when you finally discover what the conspiracy was about, it’s silly. (cf. the changed ending in the film version of Watchmen…)

The knowing silliness of some conspiracy novels might rule them out as genuinely political, even when the characters are doing political things: if the politics is impossible, but the writer doesn’t care, because that’s not what the book is really about, then it’s not a political book. I offer Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as an example of how a novel can be neither good nor political.

a Bond movie doesn’t end with the villain being struck by lightning and hit by a crashing airplane at the same time.

Like that wouldn’t be cool!

lemuel @219: re contemporary-ish novels about “the world of work and money” — Louis Auchincloss. E.g. The Partners. Most of his novels I haven’t read, but that one I have read; it’s ok, if somewhat dated.

I don’t actually think there’s a problem in principle with the Smilla conspiracy being basically a silly one — part of the point the book’s making, after all, is that the conspirators are such monomaniacs of a particular kind that they can’t see to defend themselves from her; that they’re highly intelligent from one perspective and deeply stupid from another — that their lack of certain key sensibilities, such as sympathy for their fellows and empathy for their surroundings, actually makes them stupid and self-destructive in the long term — which is part of the politics of the book, if you like. And as I said above, I think greater indifference to the specifics of the conspiracy could maybe have been made to work, in exactly this setting — ie the sea and ice near West Greenland; even the asteroid, why not? If Smilla solved it but deliberately didn’t tell us what they wanted to do with it, because it was evil and therefore stupid; something like that. That would fit her character, after all; and her politics. The problem is really that Hoeg has an indifference to the formal conventions of the genre, as regards endings: and kinda deals with this by going “Fuck you, here’s an ending if you want one — yes it’s stupid, but so are you for wanting one!”

I assumed that the lethal worm was a mutation caused by the radioactive asteroid: though I’m not certain this is stated. I’m also not 100% convinced that any of the details Smilla uncovers — radioactivity or worm or whatever — are meant to be correct, in Sherlock-Holmes-reveal terms: some of the conspirators believe some of them; others merely want people to believe them, because this gives them leverage. But this aspect is all so casually handled — bcz Hoeg is unsympathetic with the politics of Holmesism? — that the unclarity gets in the way of itself. He sets himself a problem he doesn’t solve.

In other words, the asteroid-worm mcguffin is — possibly — actually a mcguffin within the story also, as far as the chief conspirator is concerned: just something, true or rubbish, that gets people frightened, which he can use. Which is potentially a neat idea — except it’s handled poorly instead of well.

Wow, a bunch of Europeans and Americans came up with a European-American-centric list. Who would have guessed?

I think what burritoboy is flagging is, as someone said, partly the difference between modern and premodern literature, rather than the novel and other forms. In modern drama and poetry, it is easy to come up with examples that are not primarily political in any narrow sense: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Waste Land, The Three Sisters, Desire Under the Elms, Waiting for Godot, the Cantos. Even works with major political themes tend not to be purely political: Howl, Angels in America.

That said, I do think the literary novel has limitations for dealing with politics, resulting from the centrality of character and the necessary appeal to sympathy. Because of our desire to see virtue in ourselves, there are potentials that are clearly in human nature – that are demonstrated empirically in history, including modern and contemporary – that we will be resistant to recognize as potentials in ourselves. Literary novels have trouble with villains, though history throws them up like houseflies. Rather we must see villians as they see themselves, as in some sense fundamentally good people.

The 20th century has given us many deeply impressive villains – Hitler, Stalin, Pot, we all know the list – but literature that deals with them directly is thin on the ground. Much of the serious treatment of the Holocaust, for example, is really about the unthinkability of the Holocaust, how full comprehension defies our imagination – The Tin Drum, Maus. But these atrocities were not done by aliens but by men, in many cases (including the Khmers), modern educated men – people much like us. We resist the notion that such evil is a real part of our natures and resist sympathy with or understanding of such characters. Hence, the literary novel has trouble approaching the darkest poentials of human nature directly, and these always lurk as possibilities in politics, as that is where they can find fullest expression (no serial killer ever killed millions). Genre fiction has an advantage in that it is not committed to getting the reader’s sympathy for all major characters, and therefore can have villians.

Walt @ 263

As an American, let me nominate the Chinese novel, To Live, by Yu Hua. Admittedly, I read it in translation.

The scene where the communist official’s wife experiences complications during labor, and the resolution of that scene, is bitingly inspired.

Okay le triste, now do The Quiet Girl.
Which is kind of Smilla again, with a big wash of Boll’s The Clown over the strong architecture of Hoeg’s maturing vision. With his obstinate refusal to stop loving still carrying the day.
Which is what made Smilla great, right? The love that she carried through the story, for the author, and how we recognize that in our own lives and hearts.
And: Le Carre’s Absolute Friends, which is fiercely political.

Coming in super-late, I just want to mention Freedom and Necessity, by Emma Bull and Steven Brust. Somewhat obliquely political, but good. If you like long epistolary novels.

Second sentence above penned by Walt! ; quoted by me:

I can’t think of a definition of “politics” that would include Oedipus Rex, but exclude, say, Lord of the Rings.

All The Kings Men has been already mentioned.
As has Vineland by Thomas Pynchon but I agree it is underappreciated.
For a cracking read on US politics, I think the book was “Facing the Lions” by
Tom Wicker. Like a more up to date All The Kings Men.
And perhaps stretching the criteria to breaking point, Hunter S Thompson’s
Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Which applies to the generally far right wing authors of American scifi, how? They were worried that their equally right wing neighbors and equally right wing political regime would……..do what, precisely?

How does the nature of narrative apply to the exercise of power? That’d be the more accurate question. And who said I was referring only to right wing scifi writers? Three quick responses:

The virtually endless examination of literary strategies conducted in the shadow of power and in the context of social conformity has everything to do with “the generally far right wing authors of American scifi.” What part about the way narrative lit across the board and texts in general actually work did you not pick up on? Fiction as a whole and science fiction as a genre employ the same devices to persuade your average dullard and stubborn conformist alike. Distracting and entertaining the villagers — by which I refer as much to the urban cogniscenti as the rural rube — while slipping in social messages that when uttered out in the open would be deemed shocking, ridiculous, illegal or heretical is just the most general description of storytelling in and of itself.

Doesn’t really matter what the politics of the author are, or what the specific genre is. If the story takes place in Denmark rather than England or Middle Earth rather than Middlesex, if it’s set on a desert island or in an unfamiliar kingdom or deep into the future, or takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away — authors weave a storyline to release the conscious defenses crutch-like beliefs ideologues and average folks lean on in the light of day. Writers of all stripes are better able to persuade you and those you disagree with using age-old narrative tactics in general and and the less-subtle plot devices of science fiction specifically. Along the way, authors can evade persecution by enforcer and priest alike.

You seem awful eager to omit any recognition of the applicable pith within that universal trait.

Second: American science fiction is hardly defined by or limited to authors with a right-wing agenda. Upthread someone mentioned Frederik Pohl, and he’s one of many that satirized consumer culture and conformist society, or warned of totalitarian regimes.
http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/pohl-frederik

Pohl’s protagonists were often men in grey flannel suits, corporate executives, ad men, who represented the middle class culture of the near future. They worried about paying bills and getting raises. Cogs in great corporate machines, these characters often came to recognize the horrors their companies were helping to produce. . . . Pohl focused on mundane life in future cultures, asking us to reflect on social, economic, and cultural trends that might link his apocalyptic societies to our own.
http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/profiles/pohl.html

Andrew Ross has written of the Futurians: “Their injection of social consciousness into the fandom world had an enduring effect at a time when the pulp stories were beginning to address the future of authoritarian social orders. Graduating to the ranks of professional editors and writers at the end of the decade, they eventually formed something of a counterculture operating against the established power of the field’s publishers and editors.

To underscore that point a bit: you seem unfamiliar with American science fiction. To say nothing of 20th century political history.

Third, you seem to be confusing the artist with the artifact. Is it the case that a novel that weaves a story around a totalitarian political regime is necessarily promoting such a political order? Uh, no. Instead, the author might be demanding that readers take a little responsbility, and confront what kind of social, cultural and political order they can in good conscience support.

Fourth:I’m not sure we can make the case that every libertarian author is actually, in point of fact, a right-wing science fiction writer. Let’s recall the closed, nay oppressive, social and political order of the 1940s, 1950s — and which extended in signficant ways into the 1960s and 70s. In that context, writers advocating for individualism and for limited government would be taking a conservative position — and as a liberal (progressive) I can wholeheartedly agree with those values for all the right reasons. And you should as well.

In short, political repression was a serious threat from the 40s through the 60s, and its remnants still had to be contended with in the 70s, when its remnants were still felt on a visceral level.

In that context, clumsy or crude sci-fi plots were not likely to be seen as such, and as a blunt instrument were more likely to get the message across to a general audience. In that context, it may be that a writer with legitimate conservative values could oppose an oppressive culture and a repressive political regime with a fervor equal to any writer of liberal bent.

We benefit from the luxury of a more open society, but that clouds our vision and renders hindsight at best unreliable.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/10/deborah-websters-solution/

This post caught my eye: Pohl appears to have applied that nearly unavoidable kittehz captioning phenomenon to yield some insight into the use of animals as subjects in clinical trials by inverting the relationship between Schrodinger’s cat and our erstwhile, nominal observer. I think.

It occurs to me that many of CJ Cherryh’s novels–Downbelow Station, Cyteen, the Foreigner series, and other books that aren’t coming to mind right now–are political works.

I will venture the hypothesis that prior to the 20th century novels were sometimes political, that during the 20th century the political novel was marginalized, and that in the early 21st century the novel has become political again.

In my view, part of the reason the 20th century literary novel is non-political is exactly because of political meddling with the form. There were political novels, many of which were propaganda and read very poorly now, and novels of character. I am thinking here of Dos Passos’s work, after Hemingway arranged Dos Passos’s humiliation in Spain.

In a very odd sf novel, Jack of Eagles (which I do not recommend), James Blish, author and critic, once made the point that you can’t put yourself in a possible world where what you want is true and at the same time expect your study of that world to lead to useful predictions. You can’t get predictions: only projected wishes. Long years after last reading that book, it seems to me that this might be a critique of propaganda in fiction and poetry: if an author bases a novel on political predictions, the story can only give back those political predictions. Such a novel can’t speak meaningfully of the possibilities of character, only, like a religious story of sin, speak of the Harm That Will Befall When Characters Break The Rules.

The pols either wanted the form to serve their purposes, or wanted no interference with their propaganda. The great communist propagandist and publisher Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) was one of the major figures here. But the CIA seems also to have meddled in post World War II arts in the Western Bloc, though I know little of the details. And the meddling killed the art. But the meddling seems to be over, and the mainstream political novel has made a resurgence.