54

Spring, 1954. Stalin is dead, the cold war is starting to take the shape it would hold for a generation to come, Joe McCarthy is kicking commie ass and taking names, the French are in trouble in Indochina, and in the free territory of Trieste between Italy and Slovenia the big boys are trying to wrap up the last of the unresolved border disputes following WWII. Of course, to do this, it helps if they have Tito on their side. And so the MI6 call in Tito's favourite movie star to convince him... yes, it's Cary Grant, secret agent. Meanwhile, Lucky Luciano and his gang are setting up the world's heroin trade, a young Triestean is searching for his father who disappeared into Yugoslavia during the partisan years, a poor American TV set gets stolen and keeps changing owners, and a bunch of old Italians sit around at their local bar solving the world's problems over an espresso.

If this all sounds both confusing and insane, that's because it is... sorry, I meant to say, that's because it is the plot of a very ambitious 550-page novel condensed into a few sentences. Wu Ming, AKA Luther Blissett, the collective pseudonym of no less than five Italian writers, have managed something quite impressive here: it's a novel that almost manages to balance a... I mean several political thriller plots with a wild sense of humour, an underlying metaphor of the beginning US domination of the Western world both in terms of military and culture (if slightly hamfisted - there's an American TV set full of heroin, ferchrissakes, talk about your Trojan horse), a lament for/satire of the failure of democratic socialism in the post-fascist age, an attempt to sketch the outlines of a "post-war" half-century which would start with 20 years of war in Vietnam and end in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus a just all-around entertaining riff on spy and war novels. Basically, they're trying to write V, The Odyssey, Casino Royale, Underworld, Pereira Declares and The Godfather all at once. And have fun with all of them.

And the thing is, they almost manage to keep it together, anchor it just enough in reality and history to make even the more madcap parts believable. Obviously, it sprawls. With five writers working together, you have five people wanting their favourite bits in, so it gets overwritten; and with a bunch of storylines stretching out from Mexico to Dien Bien Phu and from Hollywood to Dubrovnik, with literally dozens of protagonists, they end up working just a little too hard to tie them all together. But damnit, it's flawed, but it works. For one thing, because they keep coming back to their characters and building the plot from them rather than the other way around. Even Cary Grant isn't in it as the movie star, he's in it as the struggling 50-year-old soon-to-be-has-been who's never reconciled himself with the working-class lad Archie Leach who wanted to be an actor, a living embodiment of both class, cultural and personal conflicts. You laugh at them, yes, but you smile with them and wince for them too. For another, it's so much fun that like political or philosophical ideals, it just makes you want to believe in it even when you know it's not practically feasible. In the end, of course, nothing here changes history in any big way (the last scene notwithstanding). Most of the time, individuals - even dozens of individuals working in separate storylines - don't change the world at large. Some of them die, some of them run away, some just stay at home and do their job, and the world marches on towards what we have today. But damnit, it's entertaining. It captures a world on the cusp of something, that wants to go in several different directions, but for reasons that become painfully clear end up going in a direction very few of them actually want to go. Takes out the warmth, leaves in the fire.