The contemporary progressive political novel: The Rotter's Club.

• Author: Normey, Rob

In my university days and for years after I made a point of seeking out the best literary criticism to further my appreciation of the classic novels and poems I was reading. One work of criticism that has been a lodestar for me over the years is Irving Howe's impressive account, Politics and The Novel. Howe includes the usual suspects--such masters as Dostoevsky, Conrad and Orwell, and then in the revised edition more recent writers like Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and Nadine Gordimer. I note, though, that there is a complete absence of comic novelists from his study. Using Howe's definition of a political novel as "a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting", I would count several comic novels and satires as major contributions to the field.

Canadian novels are absent from the U.S. critic's book, and indeed, with the honourable exception of novels on Aboriginal themes, the political novel, as a study of our national politics, is something our writers have largely taken a pass on. Perhaps our country is too sprawling, or Ottawa is just too distant from most people's frame of reference. There are many American writers of political novels--the late, great Robert Stone and Philip Roth being just two recent examples. Canadians admire them and also watch the dystopian take on American politics, the television series House of Cards, in droves.

I do have on my bookshelf the excellent comic novel by Sarah Jeanette Duncan, dealing with perhaps the most burning topic of her day--the need to examine our ties to Great Britain, in The Imperialist (1906). Despite high praise from the few critics looking at our domestic fiction, the book sold poorly and she soon departed with her husband to serve in the far reaches of the British Empire, ruefully avoiding Canada and its politics as a subject from that point on.

In recent times, those of us with an abiding interest in our nation's politics will be aware of Terry Fallis' light comic novels such as The High Road. These are delightful but tell us very little, in my view, about the momentous changes in our national politics this century, which have so transformed the country and discombobulated a number of us. Whatever the reasons, we clearly lack a writer who has attempted and so magnificently achieved work like that of Britain's Jonathan Coe. His most well-received novel was a classic take-down of the pretensions of the Thatcher Revolution...