Best Political Novels

Via Political Wire, I see that the Wall Street Journal has chosen as the five best political novels Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart, Qiu Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

Unsurprisingly, my choices would be different from theirs. In fact, how I define a “political novel” probably differs from theirs. Is To Kill a Mockingbird a political novel in the same sense as All the King’s Men? No, but I would certainly classify it as a political novel nonetheless.

It would take me an age to come up with what I felt was a definitive top five list of my favorite (or what I thought were the best) political novels, but the first few that came immediately to mind were: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Albert Camus’ The Plague, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and, of course, the old stand-bys: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Most of those aren’t explicitly “about politics,” but, in my estimation, very few of the best “political novels” actually are.

In fact, one of the best “political novels” I’ve ever read had nothing to do with politics at all. Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love is about a carnival family, the Binewskis, whose patriarch and matriarch decide to rescue their traveling “Carnival Fabulon” from failure by creating the best freak show imaginable with the aid of drugs, pesticides, radiation, and anything else on which they can get their hands to cause spectacular birth defects. [SPOILER ALERT] One of their progeny, Arturo the Aqua-Boy, born with flippers where his arms and legs should be, serves as the center of an amazing subplot, in which he becomes a messiah-like figure to desperate devotees, the Arturans, who deliberately maim themselves to look like him in pursuit of the gossamer promise of salvation.

On its face (and particularly in such clipped summary), it might sound like a more relevant commentary on religion, but, even when I read the book in 1991, long before the emergence of the Cult of Bush, the parallels between political cults of personality, compelling people to vote against their own best interests to honor a twisted nationalism whose architects claim is the only true definition of patriotism, seemed much more evident to me. Today, 15 years later, drawing an association between such intentional—if ignorant—self-destruction is even easier.

So, now I put the question to you. What are your favorite political novels? And, naturally, please feel free to keep with my willful undermining of the strict definition of “novels about politics” to include novels with political themes.

(Crossposted at Ezra’s place.)