The Washington Decree. By Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Translated by Steve Schein. Dutton. $28.
In the year 1935, with the novels that
brought him fame and a Nobel Prize already written and published – Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer
Gantry – Sinclair Lewis seized on the rising tide of fascism and
dictatorship in Europe, and the rise in the United States of controversial
Louisiana politician Huey Long as a potential challenger to Franklin Roosevelt,
and imagined a U.S.A. in which the depravities and social dislocation of the
Old World could emerge and thrive in the New upon the election of a determined
populist with many axes to grind. The result was It Can’t Happen Here, a novel that became a 1936 play of the same
title (by Lewis and John C. Moffitt) and that had considerable resonance in
1930s America – even though Long was assassinated just before the book’s
publication.
Fast-forward 70 years, and in 2006, noted
Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen decides to go beyond his successful and
well-known Department Q series to produce a hefty (almost 600-page) standalone novel
about the depravities and social dislocation that could emerge in the United
States upon the election of a determined populist with many axes to grind. Fast
forward another dozen years and the book, translated as The Washington Decree, seems (or is feared to be) oddly prescient
in the era of a dysfunctional presidency in which the chief executive is widely
reviled both within and outside his own party.
Under current circumstances, the fact that
so many plot points of The Washington
Decree are arrant nonsense, showing that Adler-Olsen has as little
understanding of U.S. government and culture as most Americans have of the
Danish versions, may go unnoticed by readers eager to fan their internal flames
of hatred of the Trump administration. But putting all that heavy breathing
aside, The Washington Decree is a
formulaically written (assuming it is well-translated) disappointment because
of its stock characters, constant authorial interference in its standardized
plot, and plodding pacing.
Lewis, no fan of American exceptionalism
or political excess, built It Can’t
Happen Here around a journalist named Doremus Jessup who was caught between
the forces of fascistic “corporatist” government and the then-in-vogue
Communist theories opposing them. Jessup’s character kept the narrative
grounded and gave readers, at least those who could handle Lewis’ rather unstylish
writing, a sense of the larger issues playing out in the novel.
Adler-Olsen makes a pass at creating a
central character, but ends up with an unfocused narrative that spends too much
time dealing with too many others. The intended protagonist is Dorothy “Doggie”
Rogers, a staff attorney in the administration of President Bruce Jansen.
Doggie’s casting is part of the overly complex setup of The Washington Decree. Jansen has had not one but two wives
murdered in very public ways, the first stabbed to death in China and the
second shot dead on election night. The man suspected of arranging the second
killing is a political opponent and hotel magnate named Bud Curtis – and Doggie,
a longtime Jansen staffer, is Curtis’ daughter. So she has a personal reason –
proving her father’s innocence while balancing family matters against her
carefully built, decades-long career – to become involved in the various plot
shenanigans as the United States is changed dramatically.
Just
what is going on in the country? No less than a complete, nearly overnight transformation.
The Internet is eliminated (apparently this has no discernible effect on the
economy, the stock market, or much of anything). National surveillance of the
entire population is immediately and seamlessly instituted by a super-competent
domestic spying apparatus. Ammunition is banned (apparently no one of
consequence has stockpiled much of it). Then guns are successfully banned, too
(well, more-or-less successfully). Let’s see…what else? News media are shut
down. President Jansen’s Cabinet supports everything he does. And unicorns fill
the sky. Well, not that last one – but it is no more improbable and no sillier
than everything that does happen in The Washington Decree.
Adler-Olsen’s insistence on a Cabinet
moving in lockstep with a clearly insane President – apparently largely because
many Cabinet members have suffered violence in their own lives – is one
absurdity. All the matters involving guns and ammunition are, collectively,
another. The idea that Doggie has to move quickly in whatever she does because
the death penalty for her father is going to be carried out post-haste is
another. The concept of real-world executive orders and existing agencies being
used for totalitarian purposes becomes laughable when Adler-Olsen, seeking a
veneer of plausibility, gives examples of them at the back of the book, after
the end of the narrative, and it turns out that he sees one prime-mover agency
in all the crackdowns, deadly in its abilities and efficiency, to be the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yes, FEMA, the ruthlessly efficient
bureaucracy that so brilliantly managed and coordinated the response to, say,
Hurricane Katrina.
The
Washington Decree would have worked better as sarcasm and black comedy than
as a thriller; in fact, It Can’t Happen
Here had satirical elements that rendered its more-absurd elements tolerable,
if not believable. But unlike Lewis, Adler-Olsen insists that his dark vision
be taken seriously and as a cautionary tale. And it is, but not in the way he
intends. It is cautionary for any author who is trying to use the trappings of
a society with which he is deeply unfamiliar to show, without humor as a
leavening device, the extremes to which that society has the potential to
descend.
As the body count mounts in The Washington Decree, readers will find
the viewpoint flailing about, the focus sometimes on Doggie, sometimes on a
presidential press secretary with the unlikely name of Wesley Barefoot,
sometimes on a standard-issue journalist (yes, another journalist, and another
character with an unlikely name) called John Bugatti, sometimes elsewhere. The
lack of focus is part of a broad-brush approach to genuinely serious issues in
which Adler-Olsen vitiates the potential power of his dystopian tale by letting
its steam escape through too many plot holes. The issues of power, control and
violence, of a government run amok, are
worrisome, and that alone may be enough for some readers of The Washington Decree. Certainly the
book is more up-to-date than It Can’t
Happen Here – which, incidentally, Adler-Olsen never acknowledges as a
source – and certainly Lewis’ novel suffers from clunkiness of its own. On
balance, though, The Washington Decree,
in its overreaching without really understanding its topic, proves to be its
own worst enemy: a farce masquerading as a just-possible nightmare.
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