The Manchurian Candidate

I'd always intended to read this book, but never got around to it. A friend recently praised it as having been, many years ago, one of those that shaped his young thought processes, and that was my cue. I picked up a copy next time I was out, and filled in one of the holes in my literary education.

I'm glad that's finally done — at least partly, because I won't have to again. It left me wondering why it's considered so wonderful, by so many intelligent people.

From a book written in the 1950s, I naturally expected a certain amount of political naivete. But a straight-faced statement that they couldn't simply kill the assassin because that's not the way the U.S. does things was above and beyond. Even while the book was being written, various parts of the U.S. government were dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD, hoping it might lead to mind-control drugs; deliberately infecting people with syphilis so as to study its long-term effects; and carrying on secret wars in various parts of the world. Granted, these facts didn't come out until later, but even at the time, the notion that the creator and sponsor of the CIA couldn't stomach a single teeny-weeny political assassination could only be attributed to jingoism.

This sort of thing could have been dismissed with a roll of the eyeballs, tho, if I hadn't already been seriously disimpressed with the book's basic premise. The Commies went to an awful lot of trouble and expense to make themselves a common assassin. Surely, even denizens of the very purest command-driven economy must have some conception of cost-effectiveness. Couldn't they see that a person whose actions they could control perfectly over a lengthy period of time was worth more than the half-dozen or so murders they got out of him over the years?

And what would be a sensible way to handle an assassin like that? Would a thinking person cause him to sink into the background of society, never calling attention to himself, emerging only to do his job and then sink back into obscurity — or would they manipulate events to make him a famous, influential political columnist, recognized wherever he goes? I know which one I'd do — but supposing I'd gone crazy and made him famous despite the fact that it makes no sense to do so, I certainly wouldn't be crazy enough to keep using him as a mere assassin; there are much better things you can do with a pawn like that.

And then, the Big Surprise, when we find out who his main manipulator is. Golly gee, what an unexpected development! I mean, who would have guessed? Speaking of whom, I was also disimpressed with the clumsy way that character was loaded down with unsavory characteristics like drug addiction and incest, none of which seemed either necessary or desirable from the standpoint of furthering the story. I prefer a more minimalist treatment — the evil nature of a villain stands out in sharper relief if the character isn't also made unattractive in every possible way.

I was also somewhat annoyed by the literary level of it. Once, it was possible to say that every educated person in the English-speaking world was familiar with certain works — the Greek and Roman classics, the early vernacular writers, the Victorian poets Mr. Bartlett seems so fond of … But that day is long past. Nowadays, to tout oneself as "educated" because one has taken the time to learn those things in detail while ignoring the more practical forms of knowledge, which have exploded exponentially in this century, is to turn ignorance into snob appeal. A certain amount of such snobbery isn't bad — and anyway, I do think I personally managed to spot the majority of Condon's allusions — but I regard it as the equivalent of my having stuck obscure Uncle Scrooge references into Mighty Morphin Power Rangers stories, except that this is aimed at English majors instead of comic book fans. The basic difference, as I see it, is that they seem to take such foolishness more seriously. I don't mean to denigrate the practice of literary allusion, because it's an excellent way to convey meaning — but an effective allusion would be one that makes use of the common cultural background shared by author and reader; whereas I had an impression these were designed to go over the average reader's head, accomplishing nothing but to impress him with the author's erudition.

By the way, who dreamed up the title? There was no character in the book who could at all be construed as Manchurian, who was a candidate for anything.

I found the whole thing nothing but a gussied-up routine spy thriller — and for that matter, not all that thrilling.