The Coup

Rating:
Summary: Updikean drama of the Third World
Review: "The Coup" is strange subject matter for John Updike -- a novel about, and narrated by, the president of a fictional Marxist Islamic central African nation called Kush, formerly a French protectorate, now (as of the 1970s) allied with the Soviets. Although the narrator, Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou, holds the office of president of Kush's governing council, he is effectively a dictator; but unlike Stalin or Saddam Hussein, he does not have his face enshrined in every public place, and prefers to be known only by name so he can travel around his country incognito when he wants to inspect various operations. Presently he is presiding over a national crisis: Kush is suffering from a long drought, his people are starving, and there is little he can do about it.

Ellellou unsurprisingly resents America, the world's greatest exponent of capitalism and tacky culture, "that fountainhead of obscenity and glut," as he calls it. "Offer your own blacks freedom before you pile boxes of carcinogenic trash on the holy soil of Kush," he haughtily tells an American aid worker just before his legions make a bonfire out of a large supply of donated food which engulfs the unfortunate man who brought it. His attitude stems from the time he spent there in the 1950s as a student at a small college in Wisconsin, where he met several other black students including a member of the Nation of Islam who helped to fuel his hatred towards whites. This was also where he met a WASPish white girl named Candy Cunningham, who, spiting her family, became one of his wives when he moved back to Kush. (Observing the polygamy allowed to him by Islam, Ellellou has three other wives he keeps in separate homes, and a mistress named Kutundu who figures significantly in his imminent downfall.)

Ellellou is not the nicest guy in the world, but Updike gives him a voice that makes him strangely likeable over the course of the novel. Referring to himself alternately in the first and third person, Ellellou recounts the recent history of Kush, the original coup that brought him to power and the mostly bloodless one that subsequently ousted him, the object lesson of which is that power easily won is just as easily lost. He grimly recalls the execution he personally performed on the exiled former king of Kush, Edumu, whom he had (somewhat unjustifiably) accused of tyranny and blasphemy against Allah. A similar fate could have befallen him when his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Michaelis Ezana, engineers a brighter future for Kush by opening its doors to American commerce, but fortunately after his own coup, Ellellou is merely consigned to taking jobs as a short order cook and a parking garage attendant.

Ellellou is an intelligent man but a political fool, and the novel's implication may be that communism is destined to fail less because of its ideological weakness than because its egomaniacal leaders simply don't know how to lead. Updike's garish prose style is a familiar element here, and the African setting gives him the opportunity to exercise his considerable descriptive abilities in an exotic context, although as good at that as he is, the cutaway views detailing his protagonist's culture-clashing experiences in America show that he is most comfortable and convincing in the literary vivisection of his own country.

Rating:
Summary: Updike in Africa
Review: I thought that "The Coup" was a curious novel. It's written as the memoirs of Ellellou, President of the fictional African country of Kush. Ellellou reflects upon the events surrounding his acquisition of power, his relationships with his various wives and mistresses, the effects of US and Soviet intervention in Africa, and his earlier life as a student in the United States.

I suppose you could look upon "The Coup" as a satire on post-colonial Africa and the Cold War. But really, this being an Updike novel, it's just as much a tilt at American society: much of the novel is devoted to Ellellou's time in the US, and in particular his encounters with the Nation of Islam. Ellellou is just as much disconcerted by the Nation of Islam's intolerance of his realtionship with a white woman as he is by the racism of his girlfriend's father. And there's many more relfections on American society.

In all, I thought that Updike's writing in "The Coup" was less assured than I've become accustomed to. The satire worked far better in the "US" parts of the novel than the African bits, not surprising as the former seems to be Updike's forte. As such, I found it an uneven book. It's noentheless worth a read if you're looking for Updike trying something different.

Rating:
Summary: An astute and humorous look at Cold War politics in Africa
Review: If you have ever lived or worked in Sahelian Africa (or in the developing world in general) read this book! At first I had my doubts that a man who is best known for portraying suburban America could write about Africa. But the same keen eye for social nuance, and biting humor come to bear on a fictional Sahelian country and its leader who is playing the Cold War superpowers against one another for fun and profit. I think what impressed me the most, was Updike's ability to get inside the head of an African leader who has one foot in Western academia and the other in his pre-Saharan village. And, of course, Updike writes beautifully on just about any topic. I have read a lot of books about Africa, from the literary to mundane travelogues, but this book ranks among my favorites both for its humour and the underlying insight to what's gone wrong in Western relations with Africa.

Rating:
Summary: One of His Best
Review: It took me 15 years but I finally did it. I finished reading "The Coup" this week and that means I have read all of Updike's published novels and short story collections. I'm no expert but this one has got to be one of his best. All the usual Updike elements are there: flawless prose, "tragicomic" situations (emphasis on "comic" in this book), character development, and the pace is just right. The scene where the protaganist meets the parents of his American girl friend is simply hilarious. If you're a fan and haven't read "The Coup" you're definitely missing out. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: One of His Best
Review: It took me 15 years but I finally did it. I finished reading "The Coup" this week and that means I have read all of Updike's published novels and short story collections. I'm no expert but this one has got to be one of his best. All the usual Updike elements are there: flawless prose, "tragicomic" situations (emphasis on "comic" in this book), character development, and the pace is just right. The scene where the protaganist meets the parents of his American girl friend is simply hilarious. If you're a fan and haven't read "The Coup" you're definitely missing out. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: All Animals Are Equal...
Review: Updike has created a strangely loveable tyrant in Ellelou. An impotent, Islamic fundamentalist zealot, Ellelou is the president of a mythical African socialist republic, Kush, and he narrates this great bad dream of a book. His voice is expertly used to comically tease out and eventually lay bare the self serving hypocrisy at the heart of Soviet and US power politics as the cold war nears its end in the late 60s/early 70s. A supporting cast is wonderfully sketched. The bureaucratic toad with the silk Parisian shirts and penchant for all things western, Ezana, is very funny. The delightfully spirited yet doomed liberal Amercan wife of Ellelou, Candy, (whom he seduced and transplanted to Kush having met at university in America) recalls the noble yet faintly ridiculous "human shield" volunteers who set off to deflect the American bombs in the recent Iraq war only to fall out along the way in a cloud of petty squabbles. Ellelou's many other wives are a joy to behold and often quite saucy. The American diplomat Klipspringer is wonderfully vacant, simple of mind and outlook, eternally buoyant and optimistic, no doubt he went on to great things under Reagan!

This is all great fun and no one escapes the author�s scalpel that dissects, via jibes and faux-dogmatism, the vacancy at the heart of everything. All are treated equally here: middle class America, drunken (stereotypical unfortunately) Russian missile crews, the USA's private racial embarrassment, the world�s great religions, clownish black Muslim students, superpower policy in the poorest countries, arrogant white liberal professors (who understand Africa better than Africans...!), naive peace workers, the paper-thin nature of African government, jet-setting diplomats, all are given equal rights to make themselves look foolish - which is a lot of fun but not very optimistic. Updike's future is always bleak. I think he sees the future of human history as a facsimile of its past, only bigger and worse: more war, more violence, more division, more exploitation, more dogma, more illness, more pollution, more greed, more stupidity - and ultimately, no doubt, a perfect peace. But there'll be no one left to enjoy it. I think he's probably right, humans can�t help themselves and we�re all fiddling while Rome burns. Updike�s unique strength (his obvious talent aside) is that he�s one of the few writers who sees this and points it out, without offering any sort of optimism, solution or last chance. Certainly, he�s the most eloquent of these visionaries. His gift is to get to the heart of matters and show us that there's little of merit there.

The novel loses a little focus from the point where the former King of Kush�s head (a Soviet funded re-animated robot version of the one decapitated publicly by Ellelou) speaks to visiting tourist parties. This leads to an odd and dreamlike penultimate segment in a sleek mirrored glass city, a capitalist Eden that has sprung up in the Sahara thanks to the discovery of that slippery black stuff that causes so much trouble today. But there is a staggeringly powerful and amazingly well written mid-section in which Ellelou travels the remote regions of Kush�s badlands, with his stoned and racy wife Sheba in tow, and the narrative switches effortlessly between his college days as a disgusted, vaguely amused and mostly detached student in the States and the parched present as the president of next to nothing. A great book, buy it and read it, it has a lot to say about our own troubled times but absolutely nothing to offer them, which is - I think - the whole point of John Updike.

Rating:
Summary: All Animals Are Equal...
Review: Updike has created a strangely loveable tyrant in Ellelou. An impotent, Islamic fundamentalist zealot, Ellelou is the president of a mythical African socialist republic, Kush, and he narrates this great bad dream of a book. His voice is expertly used to comically tease out and eventually lay bare the self serving hypocrisy at the heart of Soviet and US power politics as the cold war nears its end in the late 60s/early 70s. A supporting cast is wonderfully sketched. The bureaucratic toad with the silk Parisian shirts and penchant for all things western, Ezana, is very funny. The delightfully spirited yet doomed liberal Amercan wife of Ellelou, Candy, (whom he seduced and transplanted to Kush having met at university in America) recalls the noble yet faintly ridiculous "human shield" volunteers who set off to deflect the American bombs in the recent Iraq war only to fall out along the way in a cloud of petty squabbles. Ellelou's many other wives are a joy to behold and often quite saucy. The American diplomat Klipspringer is wonderfully vacant, simple of mind and outlook, eternally buoyant and optimistic, no doubt he went on to great things under Reagan!

This is all great fun and no one escapes the author's scalpel that dissects, via jibes and faux-dogmatism, the vacancy at the heart of everything. All are treated equally here: middle class America, drunken (stereotypical unfortunately) Russian missile crews, the USA's private racial embarrassment, the world's great religions, clownish black Muslim students, superpower policy in the poorest countries, arrogant white liberal professors (who understand Africa better than Africans...!), naive peace workers, the paper-thin nature of African government, jet-setting diplomats, all are given equal rights to make themselves look foolish - which is a lot of fun but not very optimistic. Updike's future is always bleak. I think he sees the future of human history as a facsimile of its past, only bigger and worse: more war, more violence, more division, more exploitation, more dogma, more illness, more pollution, more greed, more stupidity - and ultimately, no doubt, a perfect peace. But there'll be no one left to enjoy it. I think he's probably right, humans can't help themselves and we're all fiddling while Rome burns. Updike's unique strength (his obvious talent aside) is that he's one of the few writers who sees this and points it out, without offering any sort of optimism, solution or last chance. Certainly, he's the most eloquent of these visionaries. His gift is to get to the heart of matters and show us that there's little of merit there.

The novel loses a little focus from the point where the former King of Kush's head (a Soviet funded re-animated robot version of the one decapitated publicly by Ellelou) speaks to visiting tourist parties. This leads to an odd and dreamlike penultimate segment in a sleek mirrored glass city, a capitalist Eden that has sprung up in the Sahara thanks to the discovery of that slippery black stuff that causes so much trouble today. But there is a staggeringly powerful and amazingly well written mid-section in which Ellelou travels the remote regions of Kush's badlands, with his stoned and racy wife Sheba in tow, and the narrative switches effortlessly between his college days as a disgusted, vaguely amused and mostly detached student in the States and the parched present as the president of next to nothing. A great book, buy it and read it, it has a lot to say about our own troubled times but absolutely nothing to offer them, which is - I think - the whole point of John Updike.