![]() ![]() ![]() What struck me more was how, six decades ago, Condon’s style adumbrated the creeping sense of absurdity that so many of us cope with on a daily basis: that feeling you have when you wake up every morning and you think, How indescribably idiotic is the world going to get today? That’s the space Condon inhabits it was the driving force behind his over-the-top writing.Ĭonsider this simile from The Manchurian Candidate describing what it feels like to be the subject of a British tabloid report: It was “not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one’s teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history’s most profligate hang-over.” That’s a ridiculously overwritten sentence just to retype it makes me feel like I’m going to get scolded by an MFA professor. This was not just a book that presaged the Zeitgeist because it was about an enemy manipulating our political system - though that part, particularly early scenes that feature a Chinese psychiatrist demonstrating his brainwashing techniques on Shaw, did feel weirdly resonant. The Times, in its initial review, called it “a wild, vigorous, curiously readable melange.” But the further I got into it, the more I began to think that Condon, in his messy way, had tapped into something bigger. It took some time to adjust to Condon’s prose it is, as Louis Menand wrote in a 2003 New Yorker appraisal, a deeply strange book with wildly shifting tones, odd word choices, and often baffling metaphors (some of that may have been by design one blogger found that Condon appeared to have cribbed certain phrases from Robert Graves’s I, Claudius). But what I also discovered in those pages - and in Condon’s worldview - was something that, while originally targeted at the barbarities of McCarthyism, felt like a pitch-perfect anticipation of our current national mood. I was expecting to encounter a dated pulp novel larded with camp, and I wasn’t entirely wrong. ![]() The title, The Manchurian Candidate, invoked since Trump’s election by columnists and cable-news jesters of both left and right, had been echoing like an air-raid siren in my head for more than two years during the buildup to the Mueller report. But over time, Condon’s novel has taken a back seat to Frankenheimer’s film and been largely relegated to the shelves of used bookstores like the one I wandered into on a rainy afternoon in San Francisco earlier this year. In the years since, the story has undergone the occasional reboot: John Lahr’s 1994 stage play, Jonathan Demme’s anodyne 2004 Gulf War–era remake, even a 2015 operatic adaptation. It sold well enough, and its profile grew in the wake of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation, which itself took roughly 25 years to find a lasting audience, perhaps having something to do with the assassination of JFK. It was not exactly greeted as highbrow literature, but the reviews were generally good Time put it on its list of Ten Best Bad Novels. Sixty years ago, in April 1959, Condon’s second novel was loosed into a world beset by McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia. Photo: John Bryson/The LIFE Images Collection/Gettyīefore it plunges us into its uniquely satirical hellscape, Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate teases with an upbeat opening sentence: “It was sunny in San Francisco a fabulous condition.” After which we delve into the tale of a brainwashed Korean War veteran named Raymond Shaw, who is surrounded by power-mad politicians and duplicitous foreign agents and tasked by his own unscrupulous mother to carry out an epic political assassination. The Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon. ![]()
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