Man of Straw - Heinrich Mann

 The tricky thing with satire is drawing it out to fill a decent-sized novel.   Heinrich Mann pulls it off with Man of Straw.   Diederich Hessling is the ultimate New Man of turn-of-the-century provincial Germany, obsessed with the Kaiser, with being a Kaiser in his home, work and personal life.   Mann's first achievement is to make Diederich his hero (so many lesser satirists make the object of their dislike a secondary character).   The second is to humanize him.   We see what made Diederich a New Man: his childhood, sickly and frightened of everything; his awkward time at University in Berlin where he ultimately finds his place with the Neo Teutons whom he imagines will take over Germany; his army service, which he loves but which is cut short by ill-health.

In practice it is only Diederich who makes a success of Neo Teutonism.   Other members he encounters in later life are failures, oddballs.   Diedrich returns to Netzig to take over his father's paper factory.   He does the round of the great and good of the town.   Among them is his hero, Herr Buck. a man involved in everything and universally admired.   His is the position Diederich aspires to.   But Buck is a social reformer - a liberal by modern standards - and Diederich a royalist ultra-conservative.   His son, Wolfgang, whom Diederich befriended in Berlin, is ever so slightly decadent.

Diederich's progress is neither easy nor straightfroward.   He calls out Old Buck's son-in-law, Lauer, for derogatory comments about the Kaiser.   This is a criminal offence.   Diederich is the chief witness for the prosecution.   Wolfgang Buck leads the defence.   Diederich panics and tries to wriggle out of the situation.   But he can't.   Mann shows him writhing in the witness box, struggling to find an answer to Wolfgang's cross examination.   And in the pit of despair he finds a crumb of courage and responds.   To his amazement Lauer is convicted and imprisoned.   Deiderich has won.

The business is losing money.   Diederich in his pomp and ambition has overstretched himself.   He tries to cheat his suppliers and finds an unlikely ally in his machinist, the social democrat union man, Napoleon Fischer.   They become partners in fraud and politics.   Diederich joins the town council.    Fishcher ultimately makes it all the way to the Reichstag.

And alongside all this we have Diederich's personal life.   He has let a girl down in Berlin.   He wins the local hieress Guste from Wolfgang by starting a rumour that they are half-brother and sister, which perhaps they are.   He cheats one of his sisters, Magda, of her inheritance, but protects his other sister, Emma, when she is let down.

There are three tremendous episodes of pure farce in Man of Straw which anchor the theme.   The first, at the end of Chapter One, is in 1892 when Diederich is a student in Berlin and comes across a huge crowd of the unemployed protesting in Unter Den Linden.   The Kaiser comes to face them down.   He does not address them, he certainly doesn't give them the bread and work they demand.   He simply appears, on horseback, with his entourage.   He simply shows himself and the protestors are silenced.   Diederich is one of the cheering throng who run after the imperial retinue.   He finds himself in the park, on a bridle path.   He finds himself facing the Kaiser himself.   Diederich falls into a puddle.   The Kaiser laughs.

On honeymoon with Guste in Switzerland, Diederich spots the Kaiser again.   This time he follows him all the way to Rome where he keeps a sort of personal guard outside the Kaiser's hotel.   And finally, after the unveiling of the statue of the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in Netzig - Diederich's personal project, which has cost millions to achieve - turns into a total waterlogged disaster, Diedrich turns up at the Buck house and watches from the corridor outside Old Buck's sickroom as his first, fallen hero, the Kaiser of Netzig, dies.

The best and most challenging novel I have read so far in 2024. 

Myron - Gore Vidal

 Myron is not as good as Myra Breckinridge for two reasons.   Firstly, it's more about Myra and her attempts from Myron, and secondly, the second joke is rarely better than the first, especially when your first sally is as good as Myra Breckinridge.   That said, Vidal upends expectations.  We assume Myron is a prequel but it is actually a sequel.   The original pre-Myra Myron was a cinema geek, an intellectual, whereas this Myron, following Myra's car crash and surgery is a dull-as-ditchwater middleclass Californian in the Chinese Food business.   Time, of course, has moved on and we find ourselves in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal.   Myron, meanwhile, finds himself (with a stroke of Swiftian brio) stuck on the set of the MGM movie Siren of Babylon in the summer of 1948.   Here, it is always the summer of 1948.  When the movie finishes shooting, they simply start shooting again.  Out-of-towners like Myron, who have somehow time-slipped here, stay at the Thalberg Hotel, largely unnoticed by the locals.   When they try and speak of their situation, it comes out as meaningless gibberish.

In these circumstances Myra, deeply and firmly supressed by Myron, starts to re-emerge.  Being herself a made-up character she registers better with the locals.   Among the out-of-towners at the Thalberg is Maude, a gay hairdressers with a sideline in drag, who helps Myra regain her looks.   Myra makes it her mission to save MGM, to make transgender eunuchs ubiquitous and thus prevent overpopulation and the various geopolitical crises which she knows will make the western world the ghastly place it is in 1973.

Chaos and further slippages ensue.   It is all great fun but cannot  quite equal the gobsmacking transgression that was Breckinridge. 

Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal

 Myra, the young and extremely nubile widow of the late Myron Breckinridge, pitches up in Hollywood, a girl with a plan.  Her plan is to claim her widow's mite - a half share in Buck Loner's acting academy.  Uncle Buck was the brother of Myron's equally deceased mother.  Gertrude and Buck inherited a then worthless orange grove from their father.  When his career in cowboy movies began to tail off, Buck decided to build an academy for Hollywood hopefuls.  Gertrude let him do so, without ever relinquishing her entitlement to half of the land.

While Buck does everything in his power to keep hold of his money, Myra starts teaching at the academy.  She is popular with the students and soon singles out a pair of likely stars, the mean and moody Rudy Godowski and the sweet as apple pie singer Mary Ann Pringle.  The trouble is, they are a couple.  Myra, "whom no man will ever possess", is only interested in Mary Ann - which means Rudy must be broken, dispatched, and otherwise got rid of.

In the end Rudy is gifted to Hollywood super agent Letitia Van Allen, who has an unquenchable taste for masochistic sex.  She turns Rudy into a star.  Myra and Letitia between them turn him into a promiscuous homosexual.

Meanwhile Buck Loner's legal team of Flagler and Flagler come up earn their fee.  Not only is there no trace of a marriage between Myra and Myron, but there is no evidence Myron is even dead.  There is a reason for that and, in the novel's most famous scene, Myra shows them.   Buck instantly hands over the cheque.  It looks like everything will turn out hunky dory, until----

Myra Breckinridge is an American classic and a great one, in its way every bit as reflective of its period (late Sixites) as The Great Gatsby was of its.  Vidal was a genius who could have his off-days (this wasn't one) but who was never ever dull.  My edition of Myra comes as a double bill with Myron.  I can't wait.

The Fatal Eggs - Mikhail Bulgakov

I love Bulgakov. He is my favourite writer and wrote my favourite book, The Master and Margarita. The Fatal Eggs (1924-5) isn't in that league, but it is seeded through with bits of Bulgakov at his best.

In 1928 (a 'future' four years after it was written) Professor Persikov invents a red ray that speeds up the reproductive process. His invention couldn't be more timely, because a plague has wiped out the poultry of several large provinces. Eggs are hurriedly imported and bathed in the crimson glow of Persikov's ray. Meanwhile the Professor returns to his zoological studies in which his specialism happens to be eggs. Unfortunately, due to a typical bureaucratic blooper, supplies of eggs get mixed up. Poultry farms receive the eggs of amphibians and reptiles while Persikov wonders what he's supposed to do with common or garden chicken eggs.

The outcome - for Bulgakov - is inevitable. Giant predatory reptiles run amok in the provinces and rioting Muscovites attack the scientists. It's all wild, comic and clever. Just as the common cold did for H G Wells' martians, so a premature frost polishes off the tropical monsters. But, being Bulgakov and not Wells, we are reminded that some poor wretches have to dispose of the rotting corpses.

A fine translation by Roger Cockrell perfectly captures the tone.

The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One is Waugh's satire on the American Way of Death, dedicated to Nancy Mitford (whose sister Jessica, if memory serves, wrote something similar). Dennis Barlow is a young war poet who has headed to California to try his luck in the movies. He has somewhat let the side down, not only by losing his place at the studio but - far worse - by taking common or garden employment, to whit assistant at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. Members of the Hollywood Cricket Club, expat writers, actors and general support players, have called to express their disapproval. Sadly, it is not Brown who takes their warning to heart. It is his landlord, Sir Francis Hinsley, celebrated author turned scriptwriter turned publicist turned nobody, who when he loses his last tenuous connection to Megalopolis Pictures, does the decent thing and tops himself.


Dennis has to take charge of making the arrangements. The Club has decided no expense should be spared, which takes our hero to Whispering Glades Memorial Park where he meets the dedicated mortician Aimee, and complications ensue...


The Loved One is a brilliant, beautiful book, 140 pages of magnificently elegant prose, very funny and very dark. I have become a Waugh fan in my later years but this is by some distance the most enjoyable of his fictions I have come across.

It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis

The other book about Donald Trump was written 80 years ago by Nobel Prize Winner (the first American winner) Sinclair Lewis. And it is both funny and scary.

It's scary because his outsider president, Buzz Windrip, spouts the same meaningless word-association babble that Trump does. Buzz too is known by his first name, which he has made into a brand. He has even sort of written a sort of book, which Lewis gleefully quotes at length (having obviously made it up in the first place). It's scary in that Lewis wrote it in 1934-5, when Hitler and Mussolini seemed poised to take over Europe, if not the world. It is no surprise, then, that Buzz turns out to be an American fascist dictator, who institutes work camps for the poor, local commandants to keep them poor, and uniformed Minute Men to enforce the will of the commandants. And the people love it - because Buzz Windrip has made America Great Again.


It can't happen here? Well it just did. How long, we wonder, before somebody on Fox News mentions Buzz Windrip and The Donald naturally assumes he was a real president, wiped from history by Fake News? His stormtoopers won't be called Minute Men, though, because Trump can't tell the difference between minute (time) and minute (tiny) and he has tny hands and therefore, in his mind, a tiny penis.
Anyway, back to the book. The story concerns Doremus Jessop, the sixty-year-old editor-owner of a local newspaper in Fort Beulah Vermont. He fancies himself a free-thinker, an armchair radical, but the unexpected triumph of President Buzz challenges all his preconceptions. Doremus (magnificent name) is sorely tested, he pays a high price for his beliefs and almost childish acts of sedition. Does he face up to the challenge? Does he answer the call? That's what the book is about and it would be unfair to reveal the answer. Incidentally, the way Lewis ultimately rolls out the answer demonstrates the skills needed to win the Nobel Prize.


There is a certain Augustan tone to the writing, echoes of Swift and Pope which are pitch-perfect for what is, after all, satire. It Can't Happen Here is a triumphant book. Given that Lewis knocked it off in a frenzied burst of activity, it begs the question, how good are his other books? And why the hell have I left it so late to discover him?

How the Hell Did This Happen? - P J O'Rourke

It is as if P J O'Rourke had been waiting all his life for Donald Trump to waddle along. Sure, he cut his pointy teeth on Richard "Tricky Dicky" Nixon, and kept his satirical eye in with the line of presidential duds that followed Reagan (it really is bad news when you realise George H W Bush was the last truly competent president). But Trump is the prize for O'Rourke, the fact that he was up against the hopelessly flawed and eminently corruptible Hillary Clinton an unlooked-for bonus. Yes, they can set up inquiries into Russian hacking but they can't get round the fact that the leaks were genuine and true.

So, the moment he had stopped rubbing his hands in glee, O'Rourke sat down and started a journal. However the election panned out, he knew he had a bestseller in the pipeline. He starts by disposing of the small fry, the Ted Cruzes and Jeb Bushes of this world who nevertheless turned out to be the best of a very shabby stream of also-rans who came and went over the course of the primaries.
O'Rourke knows this election was not about either Trump or Clinton. He knows it is really about the abused electorate getting their own back on the elite who bailed out the banks and hawked American jobs off to the most disreputable overseas charlatan they could find. The men in shiny suits who have spent more on their teeth than the average voter earns in a year. Men like, well, Messers Cruz and Bush 3. He explains at length how it is really about delivering one below the belt to the self-appointed elite.


The ultimate triumph of Trump is not thanks to him or her. It is down to the failure of America's ludicrous electoral system. If these two are the best the Democrats and Republicans can come up with then the system is rotten to the core. O'Rourke has always espoused this thesis. Now he has the proof positive, glowing uranium orange behind the big desk in the Oval Office.


So read his book. Laugh. Laugh out loud because it is very very funny. Then weep.

The Man Who Japed - Philip K Dick

One of three early novels collected here, The Man Who Japed was written in 1956. It is set in the second decade of the 22nd century but it looks and sounds a lot like 1956. What Dick is doing is satirising the homely, apple-pie culture of the American Fifties and preserving its worst aspects - the sanctimonious self-righteousness, the fetish of the upwardly mobile, and above all the hysterical dread of infiltration by the unclean outsider.
Armageddon devastated the Western World in the 1970s. A hero arose from the ashes, Major Streiter. Unfortunately Streiter was a South African major at a time when the Boer state was not exactly known for its liberality. The society that Streiter created in his own image was called Morec - Moral Reclamation. Provided they remained moral, a family could aspire to rise over the generations, winning leases on one-bedroomed flats ever closer to the omphalos, the statue and spire honouring the New World Patriarch in Newer York.
Allen Purcell is one such high-flyer. In his late twenties, he has his own agency providing 'packages' for the state broadcaster Telemedia (TM). One morning Purcell is offered the ultimate promotion - director of TM. There's just one problem: earlier in the week Purcell spent the night in Hokkaido, drinking wine with two outsiders of his acquaintance; on the way home he passed through the park and 'japed' the statue of Major Streiter. That is to say he vandalised it. Big time. His unauthorised absence has been noted. A couple of days later he is seen with an attractive young woman who is not his wife.
The young woman is in fact the sister of Dr Malparto, a key figure in the flip side of Morec, the side polite society doesn't like to talk about - the Resort, where Morec sequesters the ne'er-do-wells, the artistic, the antisocial, the morally unreclaimable. The Malparto siblings kidnap Allen Purcell, try to psychoanalyse him, but Allen escapes, takes the job at TM, and ends up committing the ultimate jape.
Like so much of Dick's work this is satire but not as we generally think of it. Allen Purcell is by no means the archetypal Star Wars freedom fighter. His weapon of choice is not a laser gun but mockery. Yet he is a rebel, he has a cause, and in the end he turns his back on the easy solution. He is, unusually for a Dick hero, quite likeable. I liked him anyway.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim - Jonathan Coe

I like Jonathan Coe, I like his irreverence, his depth of knowledge, his wit, though all these can, of course, become pitfalls. I like him best when he combines natural satire with compassionate characterisation.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim falls midway in his range.  The story is slightly too convoluted, the titular protagonist just a shade too bland to evoke much empathy.  The writing, however, is a joy, and the ending just brilliant. But the fact remains, the journey of personal discovery just isn't that interesting.  I'm not surprised Max's wife left him, nor that his father doesn't like him that much.  Indeed one of the sub-stories - a really clever device, revealing Max as others see him - shows him to be rather a selfish, spiteful piece of work.

Some characters are not given as much time as I would have liked. Poppy's uncle Clive, for example. That said, the risky device of anchoring Max and his journey athwart that of the round-the-world sailing cheat Donald Crowhurst works like a charm. Like Coe, I remember following the Crowhurst story in the Sunday Times as a youngster; it has had more effect on me through Coe's novel than the reality ever did.

An excellent novel, a fine example of its kind - but Coe can do better.

[I'm loving the cover art, by the way. By gray318, apparently.]

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Perhaps the ultimate classic of left-wing English literature in the Twentieth Century, Animal Farm deserves re-reading at various stages in life.  I read it at school, enjoyed it, but didn’t really get the allusions.  I’ve re-read it now, as I approach one of life’s later milestones.  I get the references now, pretty well all of them, and I still enjoy the book at its surface level.  As a child I probably identified with either Boxer the hero-carthorse, or Snowball the renegade porcine revolutionary.  Now I identify with Benjamin the grumpy but long-lived donkey.

What has to be remembered is that Orwell wrote his satire in 1945 when Russia was our number one ally and, incredible as it seems to us now, suffered censorship for daring the criticise the regime.  It doesn’t seem strange that he was censored because we still are (as Orwell himself said in the suppressed preface, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that is largely voluntary); no, the incredible thing is that the silent censors were pro-Russian.  Today, of course, you can have a profitable career writing any old bollocks about Russia so long as it’s hostile.

What I really liked about this 1989 Penguin edition is that it assumes you are literate and reasonably knowledgeable.  There are, thankfully, no pompous notes or tendentious polemics from the editor.  There is an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, currently in post-mortem obscurity and probably overrated in life, but who at least understood satire and the Eastern Bloc, and a note on the text from the editor Peter Davison which I certainly found useful.  To flesh out the volume (the fable itself is only 95 pages) we have the original preface aforementioned and a further preface for the Ukrainian edition which I skipped.

The best thing about the fable is its length.  I don’t know how much Orwell re-wrote or cut; what we are left with, however, is just about perfect.  There are enough twists and turns to keep us hooked and sufficient jokes to remind us that it is, after all, a caprice.

Great fun from a good writer at his peak.  What more could we want?

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Gibbons published Cold Comfort Farm to tremendous acclaim in 1932, when she was thirty years old.  Her career lasted another fifty years but sadly her gift didn't.  Some of her later novels, like Westwood are perfectly acceptable, but others, including Conference at Cold Comfort Farm simply are not.  It has it's moments, mostly involving Adam Lambsbreath and his cows, but the futurism which made the original so startling, and the cutting satire, are wholly absent.  I qualify satire with cutting because there is satire here, but it is pointless.  I'm sure that even in 1949 everyone knew that the surge of postwar enthusiasm and experimentalism was inherently ridiculous.  Flora, now married to a vicar and the mother of several, has become conservative, even regressive.  In place of indignation, she regards events with bemused detachment which, even in a paltry 159 pages, becomes a tad tiresome.

Whilst I remain convinced that everyone should read Cold Comfort Farm, I am sorry to report that no one need bother with this trivial sequel.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder - James de Mille

A real oddity, this.  Published posthumously in 1888, it follows the well-known fantasy trope made abundantly clear in the title, blending The Lost World with Gulliver's Travels.  The manuscript author gets lost in Antarctica and penetrates through to a semi-tropical land where dinosaurs co-exist with the Kosekin people who are incredibly kind and welcoming but who regard death as the best thing in life.

As an adventure yarn, there's not enough adventure.  There are nowhere near enough dinosaurs and those we do get - pterosaurs excepted - are simply not described well enough to be properly threatening.  So once we get established in the new world we have nothing to detain us but the unusual habits of the Kosekin and a rather tedious, formulaic romance.

The publishers (or re-publishers in this case) try to make the case for it being a satire of mid-Victorian mores, but it's not.  It's the oldest trope of all in satire, the world turned upside down.  Aristophanes did it better more than two thousand years earlier.  Again, once the premise is established - we love death/you love life, divorce is the best thing about marriage etc. - we have nowhere else to go.

For me, the part I really enjoyed was the framing device, usually the part we skip in these things (I particularly remember the tedium of the device in William Hope Hudgson's otherwise thrilling From the Tideless Sea).  Here we have an inbred toff on his yacht with a doctor, a writer of fiction and a linguist.  The chinless wonder is genuinely amusing, the writer dismisses the manuscript as a fake, and the two scholars get deep into debate of what and where the things described might be.  I can't help thinking these are the bits the academic De Mille enjoyed most too.  The very best, the last - we have to go back to the yacht, it's a requirement of the form, but instead of a wearisome epilogue, De Mille simply gives us:

Here Featherstone stopped, yawned and laid down the manuscript.

"That's enough for today," said he.  "I'm tired and can't read any more.  It's time for supper." 

The Revolution - Eric Linklater

A real oddity - three linked short stories published by the White Owl Press as a single volume just 80 pages long.  In 1934 Linklater was about five years into his fiction writing career and still wildly experimental.  We begin with the story of the Russian actress Olenina (not a million miles away from Lenin, namewise), marooned in London by the outbreak of World War I, the mistress of a high-ranking British officer and on the verge of having sex with a Russian waiter who she thinks is about to volunteer for active service.  There's a neat twist, quite funny, and then we move on to the revolution itself, in Baltland, a sort of Nordic Ruritania. King Oscar III is a benevolent constitutional monarch brought down by the actor, playwright and socialist Jean Paris - who just happens to the lover of the actress Olenina.  The King and Queen are exiled - along with Paris and Olenina, considered by the ruling Committee of Five "to be dangerous to the new Republic by reason of their ability to excite the populace, their unruly and impolite views of life, their penchant for criticism, and their tendency to revolution."  In the third story the exiles are lodged together in a Scottish Highland castle and they come to realise that their causes and beliefs are not so far apart.

Every writer goes into a bit of an eclipse after their death but Linklater's has gone on far too long.  He was a significant writer of the mid Twentieth Century with a unique outsider's viewpoint (he considered himself an Orkney man and was passionate about the very far north), an easy narrative gift, a satirical humour and a lifelong fondness for pushing the boundaries of his chosen form.  He was also a major radio dramatist with a short but critical role in World War II home front propaganda.

In many ways he's like a Scottish George Bernard Shaw but funnier and in no way a pacifist (he was badly wounded in World War I and on active duty guarding Scapa Flow before war was actually declared in 1939).