Books: Pantless at Armageddon

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (311 pp.)—Richard Condon—McGraw-Hill ($4.50).

The cultural handicappers who tick off lists of the Ten Best Books To Be Stranded in Toledo With have missed a bet. Far more interesting might be a compilation of the Ten Best Bad Novels-books whose artistic flaws are mountainous but whose merits, like Loreleis on the rocks above, keep on luring readers. A place on such a list would go to Author Condon’s second novel, an almost complete catalogue of humanity’s disorders, including incest, dope addiction, war, politics, brainwashing and multiple murder. The book carries a superstructure of plot that would capsize Hawaii, and badly insufficient philosophical ballast. Yet Condon distributes his sour, malicious humor with such vigor and impartiality that the novel is certain to be read and enjoyed.

The Pavlov Route. Man’s fate, as Condon sees it, is to work hard, sacrifice much, lead an intelligent, just and fruitful life, and then show up at the Last Judgment minus his pants. Sooner or “later, like the blind beggars toppling after their blind leader in Bruegel’s chillingly ironic painting, all the author’s characters stumble into the ditch of mortality. Satirist Condon is not afraid to set up outrageously improbable situations to achieve his effects. In his first novel, The Oldest Confession (1958), an Achilles among criminals was brought to heel while trying to hijack Goya’s The Second of May, from the Prado. In the current fable, a brilliant Chinese disciple of Pavlov—a sort of Marxist Dr. Fu Manchu—directs the capture, brainwashing and reflex-conditioning of an entire American patrol during the Korean war. Before grinning Russian brasshats, he shows off his success. The Americans puff contentedly on yak dung cigarettes and delicately avoid G.I. profanity—they imagine they are attending a meeting of the garden club in Spring Valley, N.J. They are so thoroughly Pavloved, in fact, that they are ready to commit murder on signal.

The soldiers are turned loose, each carefully convinced by the brain-conditioner that his unit has wiped out an entire company of Chinese, largely thanks to the efforts of a tall, dour sergeant. The leader of the patrol recommends the sergeant for the Medal of Honor, and he returns to the U.S. amid press-led drums and bugles, unaware that he is a walking time bomb conditioned to murder at the command of a Stateside operator.

Oedipal Wreck. Ensuing events follow each other to confusion like derailed freight cars. They involve the sergeant’s stepfather, a Senator who trades on his war wound and resembles McCarthy as played by Lou Costello, and his mother, a megalomaniac who maneuvers the Senator like a windup toy and makes an Oedipal wreck of her son.

In the end. the effort at global satire proves too strenuous. In spite of a climax as apocalyptic as any since King Kong was shot off the top of the Empire State Building, Author Condon falters as he battles both cold-war antagonists simultaneously. But in his comic set pieces, he is wickedly skillful. The book’s most memorable incident reveals the true story of the Senator’s battle scar. Stationed in Greenland, far from the smell of gunpowder but also far from any American women, the legislator-to-be seeks out the sealskinned houris of an Eskimo camp. A fight starts, and an impassioned maiden, fearful of not getting her share, gnaws him lustfully on the foot. “I guess that’s the end of the war for old Johnny,” says a buddy. But the future Senator has just begun to fight.