Black Gate

There I was, quite happily dawdling through life, free of all unhealthy obsessions, more or less content, sleeping, eating, breathing and only occasionally contemplating suicide all without a care in the world. How can I, innocent young boy that I am, be blamed for not knowing what I was getting into when I saw City of Saints and Madmen languishing on the shelf of my local Waterstones, its nondescript, faintly pretentious cover standing out as slightly less nondescript and slightly more pretentious then all the book covers, how can I be blamed if, eager to seem like the haughty intellectual I think I am, I picked it up, plopped it on the counter and handed over the criminal £10.99? I was ignorant, I was foolish, I was young and naive and romantic. I was just trying something new, buying something on impulse because, let’s face it, my life is nothing if not a series of impulse purchases and suppressed subconscious truths like ‘Connor, maybe you shouldn’t jam that entire screwdriver down your throat.’ Don’t get me wrong, though, I don’t regret buying City of Saints And Madmen — it’s the big dog’s biscuit — it’s just that it’s too good; I’m a busy guy, you know? All this saving the world from the Neo-Nazis on the moon and wrestling bears and kissing pretty girls (right on the lips, too!) is pretty time consuming stuff — I just don’t have the time to sit and grow increasingly obsessed with ridiculously good books like this. It’s just not feasible. But I did, anyway. And I loved it.

How could you blame me, though? This book is beautiful. It’s this intoxicating blend of steampunk and gothic, the twisted and the strange, its equal parts romantic and surreal, decadent and utopic and as cynical as it is intangibly hopeful; it’s written with such indefatigable passion and energy that you can feel it sparking off the page, spilling out, breathlessly, into the room around you. It’s in the thick miasma of Vandermeer’s wonderful prose, the breathless detail of his lurid settings, the unrelenting weird of his twisted narrative. There are so many reasons you should read this book I don’t know quite where to start — it’s this huge, sprawling intimidating thing that excites on so many levels explaining it is like describing the Coliseum to a man with no eyes, and only the basest knowledge of human history.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a dark horse, celebrity candidate with no experience in government comes out of nowhere to ride a wave of nativist populism all the way to the Republican presidential nomination – and the White House.

No, I’m not talking about The Donald, though, just as 1967 has entered American mythology as the year of the Summer of Love, here in 2015 we seem to be mired in what is destined to be remembered as the Summer of Trump. (What the two events tell us about historical progress or regress I won’t venture to say.)

Instead, I’m talking about the American hero of heroes, Charles A. Lindbergh, in Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. Though the book was received indifferently by most genre critics and readers (a fate often suffered by mainstream authors who poach on the SF preserve), Roth’s book is as genuine and full-blooded an alternate history as any of the classics of the genre – Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968), or any number of works by the current king of the form, Harry Turtledove.

In The Plot Against America, the story is told from the point of view of seven year old Philip Roth, a third grader living in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, with his father, mother, and big brother Sandy. They are a happy, close-knit, sociable group with a circle of gregarious friends. (Think of the working class family depicted with such affection by Woody Allen in his film Radio Days.) Philip is an ordinary American kid, occupied with his school, his family and friends, and with his hobby, that epitome of nerdish inoffensiveness, stamp collecting. (In this, Philip has been inspired by President Roosevelt, himself an ardent philatelist.) The Roth family just gets by on the earnings of Philip’s father (who works as an insurance agent) aided by the efficient budgeting of his mother, but they don’t consider themselves strapped or put-upon; though they are Jews, they share with the rest of their countrymen the optimistic American creed that always expects things to get better.

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