Kompromat, by Stanley Johnson

The first rule of political satire is that it should be funny.  (See Christopher Buckley for an example.)  Stanley Johnson's Kompromat purports to be political satire, but, other than a comic scene that sets the main events of the story in motion, it's not very funny.  Set in the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Kompromat covers the surprising passage of Brexit and the just as surprising election of a flamboyant billionaire to the White House.

The major players are so thinly disguised that it makes me wonder why he even bothers disguising them.  President Trump, Hillary Clinton, Putin, and others appear just about like real life.  I don't know enough about the players in the Brexit campaign to know how closely they resemble their real-life counterparts, but I suspect they are pretty close.  Others characters are fictionalized, of course.

Here's the one thing that makes Kompromat mildly funny.  On a trip to see a rare tiger near the border of Russia and Chine, Putin, a.k.a. Popov, "accidentally" shoots candidate Donald Trump, a.k.a. Ron Craig, in the rear with a tranquilizer dart.  This leads to speculation, real and imagined, about a subcutaneous listening device.  Throughout the book, the CIA, the Russians, and the Chinese all end up with a live feed from devices planted on Craig's body.

So Johnson is providing a context for Russian collusion in the U.S. election as well as Brexit.  It's an anti-Trump fantasy.  Clinton gets a little ribbing, too, as it's clear the FBI let her off the hook after reviewing her e-mail handing.  Mostly, though, Johnson imagines a world in which Putin is pulling strings and having his way with other countries' internal politics.

Kompromat is a less a satire than an alternative political history.  It's not very funny, but has some elements of the absurd.  It dragged, especially in the middle.  Maybe part of the problem is that the actual events of 2016 were so full of unprecedented absurdity that any attempt to make it even more absurd falls flat.


Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!