Best Political Novels

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A break from Brexit this week: we talk to the novelist Richard T. Kelly, author of Crusaders and The Knives, about what makes great political fiction. We discuss the research needed to make a political novel authentic, how to get inside the head of a politician and we ask whether May or Trump would make good fictional heroes. Plus we pick some of our favourite political novels, with literary critic Kasia Boddy.

Don't worry: more Brexit soon!

Talking Points:

How does a novelist know what it’s like to be a Conservative Home Secretary?

It’s about research and empathy.
Novelists should understand and contain forces of both revolution and counter-revolution within themself.

The best political novels often extend forward into dystopia but also backward into history to explain how you got to that outcome.

Writing the present is extremely difficult.
Political novels need human drama and conflict.
The human elements allow you to get beyond Washington or Westminster.
The challenge is to capture both powerful and ordinary people with equal verisimilitude.
Politics today are increasingly schematic, which presents problems for the novelist.

At their core, political novels are political because they deal with question of the legitimate and illegitimate use of force.

Controlling the killing machines is what makes a politician’s job different. What does it mean to live with the consequences of that kind of power?

Books come and go because of things that happen in the world.

U.S. publishers are currently reprinting a lot of old dystopias—but not many new novels.
Fiction sales are down. People are too engrossed in the daily news cycle.

The Panel’s Favourite Political Novels:

Also on the TP Bookshelf:

The Knives, Richard T. Kelly
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Charles Moore
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
The Information, Martin Amis
La Comédie Humaine, Honoré de Balzac
Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer
The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien
Crusaders, Richard T. Kelly
The Ghost, Robert Harris
The U.S.A. Trilogy, John Dos Passos
Middle England, Jonathan Coe
“Tell the truth but tell it slant—,” Emily Dickinson
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Demons (or The Devils), Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Corridors of Power, C.P. Snow
It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here:

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. Today, it's a break from Brexit, not for long,
0:11.2	there'll be more soon, but we're going to be talking about political novels, political fictions,
0:16.0	and what makes a good one, with someone who's written a couple of the best.
0:24.0	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
0:28.8	As politics speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB, where Brexit and Trump are
0:35.2	only part of a picture that includes, well, everything else. Read relevant pieces and subscribe at
0:42.0	a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking.
0:49.1	This is a conversation that we recorded a couple of weeks ago with Richard T. Kelly, who is a novelist,
1:00.0	and the author of two of the best political novels of the last few decades, The Nives,
1:04.8	and Crusaders, and we'll be talking about both of them. And we were joined by Kesha
1:09.2	Body, who is a literary critic and an expert on contemporary fiction. And we're here not just to
1:14.6	talk about Richard's novels, but about political fiction in general, what we like, what we don't like,
1:20.1	and, by the end, what our favourite books are.
1:25.5	So Richard the Nives, which is about a Conservative Home Secretary. And when I read it,
1:31.6	did that thing, which is obviously the trick of fiction, that I thought this is exactly what
1:36.0	it must be like to be a Conservative Home Secretary, but I have no idea what it's like to be
1:41.6	a Conservative Home Secretary. So how do you know what it's like? Because you've also not
1:46.3	been a Conservative Home Secretary, or any Home Secretary. I'm glad you thought that, and that was
1:50.9	sort of the idea of it. I mean, I was glad that Alan Johnson, who had been a Labour Home
1:55.1	Secretary, said he liked it and thought it was authentic, and then sort of down the road,
1:58.8	who was the occupant of the office at the time. How I got there, if it works, it's because of research,
2:04.6	a lot of research, and then that strange thing called empathy, I suppose.
	...

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