The Manchurian Candidate... again

 I went downtown recently to buy a few things, I stopped in a gifts shop. The shop sells a few books without being a bookshop, mostly coffee table books and whodunits. So I was surprised to find The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon on display. I have it, I read it, I watched the movie so often I cannot count. In fact I loved it so much that I made a reocmmendation to read it back in 2017. I don't know if you are like me, but sometimes I just wished I could discover a book all over again for the first time.

The Manchurian Candidate for #Noirvember

I know I gave as a reading suggestion The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, back in 2017, but it struck me recently that both the original novel and the movie adaptation (the 1962 one, not the ludicrous remake) would make a great read/watch for #Noirvember. I started reading it back in 2016, a few weeks after the results of the American election, then I kept watching and rewatching the movie. Given the way certain pathetic people are trying to deny the results and are barely hiding their intention to execute a coup d'état, I keep thinking that we should all revisit The Manchurian Candidate. And make sure we never let the spiritual heirs of John and Eleonor Iselin take power again.

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.

A quote from The Manchurian Candidate

This is probably (I hope anyway) the last time I am going to blog about American politics, real and imagined, for a while. Out of masochism or for cathartic reasons, I am reading at the moment The Manchurian Candidate. You probably know (like me) one of the two films that have been made out of the novel. I have seen both, the first one is by far the best and a true classic (in fact the second one is pretty rubbish in comparison). Anyway, I try not to label any work of fiction prophetic, as it often a stupid and inaccurate label: writers are not prophet neither do they tend to be. But there are things in there that are borderline identical to what we are seeing right now in the US. And among the many quotes that have been haunting me since I started reading, this one struck a chord:

"Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond's mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond's mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating-all of it together made of Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond's mother often said to friends, he was essential a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country's history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. he blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of  American foreign policy at a time when the American foreign policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, antiprogressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogues of any country on any planet."

Does it remind you of anyone? Last time they visited us, the Ticklers saw the book and told me reproachfully(as they don't want Wolfie to hear scary stories) that it looked like a scary book. They have no idea how right they are. It is absolutely chilling.