Tony Blair has entered contemporary fiction with a bang in this recent British thriller by the master story teller Robert Harris. He made of course a passing entrance in Ian McEwans' Saturday where a brief glimpse of him pretending to smile and care about some individual he was shaking hands with at the Tate Art Gallery was intended to confirm the impression of the empty suit inhabited by a skilled actor.
Robert Harris does not dispute McEwans' basic insight--but takes it further--much further--not to spoil it for readers but this highly accomplished babyboomer is reduced to a pretty accomplished puppet of a foreign power (no prizes for guessing which).
The fun is seeing how well Harris manages to (temporarily at least) convince us of the possibility and to entertain us with his amazing ability to keep his cool in situations that would alarm even the best of us. In some senses the book is more a comedy than a thriller although it has a few Agatha Christie like turns--when the book does not have its spotlight on Adam Lang-the Tony Blair character it reverts to being somewhat wooden --but as soon as Adam and to some extent his co-conspiring spouse appears--the novel becomes remarkably gripping.
What are we to make of this portrait of perhaps one of the top ten babyboomers we have -the silver tongued two term PM who dominated UK politics for more than a decade and ascended the world stage with his confident speeches that enabled the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack to be taken a lot more seriously by the liberal media in particular than if Bush was the one who had to "mis-articulate" it?
The portrait is clearly an over-reaction even a caricature--but does well to help illuminate the quality that any highly successful boomer must have--ability to perform well in front of a camera. This is a trait that Mr. Blair shared with his US counterpart Bill Clinton--both of them have a consumate ability to use TV to persuade. This gives them both remarkable powers--Harris helps us examine what happens to the inner person if those powers are not balanced by some moral compass, or even if they discover their moral core has atrophied completely. Boomers can identify with this problem well---after all were we not all brought up in the age of television--we know its capabilities and power in a way no other generation has. Add to this those skill Blair and Clinton in particular acquired as a result of their legal training. Both men have shown us their nimble skill in debate and argumentation with TV --in a way that even Nixon could not have managed as well.
Readers--do you agree with my assessment of the Harris novel--am I taking it too seriously regarding the babyboom theme--if there is one --and is there such a thing as a babyboom novel yet?
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1 comment:
I agree - this is a gripping, clever book. Not great literature perhaps: but full of ingenious literary devices including the way the lead character is never named. He also evokes the physical world of the former PM's hideaway with deft strokes. As to Blair: so much of the commentary rests on the ssumption that politicians are 1.not supposed to 'act' and 2. that they are good people. Neither is likely to be true. Politics is not about morals but power.
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