Political villains galore

Too many cleches: Iain Duncan Smith
The Weekender

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It is scarcely surprising that, faced with the daunting challenge of coping with an out-of-control collection of weirdly dysfunctional characters (Conservative MPs), Iain Duncan Smith should have sought solace in the creation of an alternative collection of weirdly dysfunctional characters whom he could control in every particular (the dramatis personae in his first and quite likely last novel).

Nor is it a matter for astonishment that one of the key themes of this thriller, whose locations range from Italy to Britain to the United States, should be the attempt by an ageing political has-been to oust the leader of his party - though in this case the would-be usurper is not a conspiratorial former British Home Secretary but a conspiratorial American Senator, Ewan Kelp.

Kelp's target is a charismatic but dodgy US president bearing a distinct resemblance to Bill Clinton, even to half of his name (Carson), as well as embroilment in sexual misdemeanours and a suspect land deal. Quite a few of those involved in these proceedings seem highly derivative.

There is shuddering mention in Kelp's camp of the disruptive doings of a "black preacher", one Benjamin Clay ("unpredictable and potentially dangerous"), who seems not entirely dissimilar to the Rev Jesse Jackson.

Duncan Smith has made an earnest attempt to write a gripping narrative, and if that attempt is less than wholly successful, it is his publishers rather than he who should be criticised. First novels can be a hazardous enterprise. John Braine's initial draft for Room at the Top was a mess that went from one publisher to another until an editor licked it into shape. Duncan Smith's manuscript, on the other hand, seems to have been published as received. The result is an unwieldy 431-page tome that inches its way along.

Every move every character makes is described at laborious length. Minor characters who make fleeting appearances are given detailed descriptions, right down to their personal aromas, with which Duncan Smith seems unduly preoccupied: "The stale smell of the man's breath and his powerful body odour" (of a van driver making a delivery, who is in and out of the narrative in a couple of paragraphs); "The rancid smell of old sweat and alcohol" (of another character who does not last even that long).

Readers are treated to a detailed description of a policeman's "grubby-looking" handkerchief (do macho US cops really carry such dainty if soiled accessories?), and told that the novel's hero, an art dealer named John Grande who unwittingly gets caught up in nefarious goings-on, possesses dual British-US nationality, even though this fact plays no part in the narrative. Nor does Grande's "half an hour's wait at the carousel for his bag" when he arrives at Kennedy Airport. One can only groan in sympathy when the book's heroine, Laura, a thrusting TV executive, urges a ponderous Italian lawyer: "Please get on with it."

The time-frame of Duncan Smith's characters' activities is less than clear. Senator Kelp - the outcome of whose underhand machinations against Carson it would be unfair to reveal - is said to be 72 and to have served with distinction in the Second World War. Even though it is pointed out that he lied about his age when he volunteered for the armed services, it would still appear that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour and a Purple Heart at the precocious age of 13.

The book climaxes, if that is the word, in a confrontation scene so replete with bewildering action and the sudden arrival of new characters that it is impossible to understand what is going on.

There is one rueful message, however, that emerges crystal clear (to employ the sort of clice that abounds throughout these pages) and rings very true indeed. One of the most wicked of this book's plethora of villains says: "It's winning, that's all, it's winning that matters." Iain, you can sure say that again.

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