Hillary takes her revenge on Trump and Boris in a novel fashion
Five hundred pages is a lot to say I told you so, but we have at least established what Hillary Clinton did during the pandemic. State of Terror is her revenge fantasy, and her revenge, on Donald Trump, which is a shame because he will probably love it more than anyone else. This is a man who incited a coup for attention. He is probably reading it now, or having it read to him.
As it opens, we are at the beginning of a new administration in America, which is, as ever, threatened by enemies foreign and domestic. President Dunn (Trump) is back in Florida, sulking, and President Williams (Biden but younger or Obama but meaner) is out of his depth. The corrupt vestiges of Dunnism loiter. The novel isn’t gentle with Dunn (Trump). He is a “Trojan horse” and “an empty vessel into which these men and women have poured their ambitions, their outrages, their hatreds and insecurities”. “Like a bubble in the bath, it [Dunn] was ready to burst at any moment and release a stink.” He smells “of meat”.
The only thing standing between America and disaster is Ellen Adams, Williams’s secretary of state (as Clinton was for Obama). The character is obviously based on Hillary, though she says it isn’t. She claims it is based on Ellen Tauscher, a former undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Whatever.
The novel opens with a series of bus bombings: one is outside Fortnum & Mason so the British reader will feel included and aggrieved. What did we do? Boris Johnson is here, too, as British Prime Minister Bellington whom Ellen thinks is “upper-class” (he isn’t) and a “twit” (he isn’t). At one point Bellington suggests to President Williams that they go out “to a pub and have a pie and a pint”, like a cartoon person. Yes, my old china.
The chase for the mastermind
behind the bombings takes Ellen across the globe: from Frankfurt to Oman to Iran to Pakistan to Russia, like a holiday you didn’t want. She has a henchlady: a best friend called Betsy, who is a former English teacher with a filthy mouth. Betsy is the true narrator of State of Terror, and she is real. In her acknowledgements Clinton names Betsy her best friend since junior school, and though I don’t understand why American women in their 70s use phrases like “best friend”, I love Betsy too. She is like an erudite Jack Russell. Perhaps she is the clever drudge Clinton would have been if she didn’t have ambition. There is also a good villain, who sends flowers and impersonates waiters, and of whom other characters say things like, “he’s hundreds of years old” or “he can kill you with a look”. “Bloated Death” – his nickname – collects dirty bombs the way Ellen collects dirty martinis. She thinks a lot about alcohol and cheesecake, and if I were surrounded by male psychopaths I would too.
State of Terror is exciting and surprising – it is co-written with Louise
Penny of the Inspector Gamache novels – and it is accidentally funny. For instance, when representatives of countries meet online, only the country’s name is used. So, we have, “France looked sceptical” or “France’s face was practically smashed up against the screen”. Often, though, it’s ponderous: “Sometimes you were the cat. Sometimes the rat. And sometimes the hunter.” Or: “Had the crack in Colonel Whitehead spread slowly, over time, until it became a chasm in General Whitehead?” Who doesn’t feel that way?
Of course, we cannot know how much of this Clinton wrote herself. I like to imagine she spent the pandemic bitching down the telephone about Trump and Obama and Biden, and Louise Penny made soothing sounds and took notes. Of course, I wish a real novelist had been where Clinton has been. I would give almost anything to read a real novelist on Vladimir Putin or Ali Khamenei, “whose turban resembled the outer ring of Saturn” or even Joe Biden. But that will never happen; they do not inhabit the same rooms. Instead, we have this, which is silly and delightful. But it feels, at the end, like a glut of something: the same glut that takes the US, in this book’s narrative, to ruin.
State of Terror
is exciting and surprising, and accidentally funny