The UK election campaign is less than 48 hours old, and already I have had enough of it. As far as I can work out you can't get a fag paper between the three parties on the vast majority of issues, and we appear to be being asked to make decisions on the basis either of whether party A's policies might save us £50 a week or party's B leader's wife is interesting. It's pretty depressing stuff in all honesty.
It's all pretty depressing. The best I can do to offer light relief, and offer some topical distraction with five great political novels I have enjoyed.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
It's been nearly 20 years since I read this novel, but I can still remember the sense of wonder I felt as I fell under the spell of this quite magical Chilean tale of family and politics. Of course the name Allende is inextricably linked to political life in Chile and the novel covers fictional ground that ties in closely with the fate of her cousin Salvador's rise and violent fall. It does so by following the passage of four generations of the Trueba family. At the time I read The House of the Spirits I was studying Latin American politics at the University of London and remember most clearly a sense of the possibilities inherent in the political dynamic of countries like Chile - a feeling that activitists genuinely had an opportunity to change the world. It is possible that there are activists fighting this current election that feel the same way. If so, I am afraid they are sadly deluded.
Lustrum by Robert Harris
Although The Ghost, the Robert Harris novel seemingly based on an imagining of a future for Tony Blair, might be more appropriate in the circumstances, that novel is not a patch on the author's Roman "trilogy", Pompeii, Imperium and Lustrum. The Romans were almost as proficient at the business of political intrigue as they were at building straight roads and Harris has captured that brilliantly in three quite splendid political thrillers. The best of these is Lustrum, which charts the political life of the great lawyer and orator Cicero and through him the beginning of the end of the Republic and the march towards dictatorship. It has class war, murder, betrayal, adultery, love and corruption. Everything you'd expect from politicians including the fiddling of expenses.
The Dying Light by Henry Porter
If Britain were a country that was paying attention to the insidious and ceaseless rolling back of the civil liberties of its people, Henry Porter would be our best known journalist and novelist. He is a tireless and clever campaigner for liberty and rights and his various newspaper columns, but primarily the Observer, should be read more widely. He is also a pretty mean novelist. His fall-of-the-Berlin Wall thriller Brandenburg was excellent. But The Dying Light, set in 2014 in the context of another General Election, combines an exciting and tense plot with a powerful political message: that legislation being enacted now, ostensibly for the defence of British citizens, is undermining freedom and holds within it the potential for (presumably) unintended but catastrophic consequences.
Revelation by CJ Sansom
Tudor history and politics is very fashionable at present and is well documented on television and in print. I could have chosen Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall as the political novel for the era, but will go instead for Revelation, the fourth and best installment of the excellent Shardlake series. Just as in imperial Roman times, maintaining one's political influence and indeed head during Tudor times was a matter of maintaining the faith of an ominopotent monarch and skilfully manipulating alliances. Sansom plots the trials and tribulations of the court of King Henry beautifully in the context of murder mysteries, and what it has over Mantel is that if you like it there are three other novels, including Sovereign.
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
Child 44 is relentlessly chilling. It exposes the full horror of the corruption of a totalitarian state in which doing the right thing politically is utterly incompatible with doing the right thing morally, and doing the wrong thing politically is dangerous to the self and to those the self holds most dear. The state in question is Stalin's Russia, a society deemed so perfect by its rulers that an investigation into the death of a child is impossible because in such a society no such crime could possibly happen. Confronting this dogma is Leo Demidov, a secret service officer who has corrupted himself with the persistent persecution of innocent men and women, and who is forced to search his soul when he is faced with the violent death of a child he knows cannot be the accident his superiors insist it is. This novel, and the sequel The Secret Speech are powerful, mesmeric thrillers.
