The Manchurian Candidate

It is still a bit too early for Christmas reading suggestion, but thought I would give you one that fits this time of year. November, after all, is when American elections are held and we are still living the aftermaths of the last presidential ones. So I suggest The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, which I read a year ago and had wanted to come back to it since. The source material of a great movie and a very poor remake (seriously why remake a classic into a cheap techno thriller?), it's a powerful novel in its own right. It is a spy novel, it's a satire, it's science fiction, it's a cautionary tale and it's fully and perfectly all these genres. Raymond Shaw is a POW, Korean War veteran, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor... Yet he did not deserve it. He is a fake, fabricated hero turned mindless assassin, after being brainwashed by the Communists. Thus completely rewired, he is a slave of both the East and his own anti-Communist mother, whom he loathes. In one of the many paradoxes of the novel, that makes Shaw a true tragic figure. The Manchurian Candidate of the title is his stepfather, Senator John Iselin, a vulgar and stupid man manipulated and dominated by his wife, a modern Lady Macbeth and the true villain of the story. And there's Ben Marco, Shaw's former commanding officer, the only man capable of stopping a conspiracy that could turn the USA into a dictatorship and lead to World War III. Read this, watch the movie and don't bother with the remake.