We Need to Talk About a Revolution

Of course none of this would matter if the book were funny; Wodehouse never, after all, bothers to make us care about Jeeves? childhood. But it?s not. It feels instead like a long hike up a switchback trail in a deep forest: lots of work, lots of backing and forthing, no vista. The stuff about Barba, for instance, should be pointedly comic?why invent a region in your satirical novel if you can?t be bothered to make up a discernible culture for it, or at the very least a bunch of funny names? Your invented world should at least aspire to the Grand Fenwick of The Mouse That Roared, even if it doesn?t quite stretch toward the Zembla in Nabokov?s Pale Fire. But Barba never really impresses itself upon our imagination. The buildings, Shriver tells us, are of a ?savings-and-loan architecture.? Fair enough, the architecture is dull. But could we take it bit further? And we never really get to know the natives, who are described as ?easygoing.?

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