Clan Gatherings

Inigo Thomas

  • The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President by Jacob Weisberg
    Bloomsbury, 271 pp, £16.99, February 2008, ISBN 978 0 7475 9394 2

An obscure utopian novel published in Dallas in 1960, Alpaca is notable less for its depiction of an ideal polity than for the fact that it was written by the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. ‘Except that I am slow, I am the best writer I know,’ Hunt once said. Alpaca is a South American country threatened with dictatorship, though Hunt’s fictional would-be dictator is a Communist, not a general. Juan Achala, a citizen of Alpaca, travels to Europe to meet its political brains, hoping to learn the secrets of Communist-dictator-proof government. He returns to Alpaca to implement what he’s been told. There will be no discussion of politics on the radio or TV: the papers will have to do. The government will have the authority to say who is fit for a job and who is not. Those who make fortunes, men whose profits the state depends on, will have more than one vote: tycoons will have as many as nine.

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Vol. 30 No. 8 · 24 April 2008 » Inigo Thomas » Clan Gatherings (print version)
Page 17 | 2134 words