19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An astute and humorous look at Cold War politics in Africa, October 12, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Coup (Hardcover)
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.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sad or Funny?, February 9, 2006
Before picking this book up, I had no preconceived notions. I have never read Updike, and I have never heard of the book. After the first chapter, I was ready for a serious look at innocent African poverty and the evil Western world. But I soon found out that this book was more of a comedy than anything else. About a fictitious nation (which I believe represents Ethiopia), this book is told from the point of view of this nation's president. The book was written in 1978 and mocks both Islam and Marxism. I don't believe a book like this would survive today's form of censorship called political correctness, but I found it refreshingly funny. Literature and art of today is fond of mocking Christianity and Democracy (which is fine, it is their right) but rarely can anything outside of those two things be poked fun at, this book helped point that fact out.
John Updike is obviously a great writer. It took me several dozen pages to get used to his writing style (heavy on satire and very witty), but I learned to really enjoy it. As an American living in a third world country- I could relate to several of the scenarios in the book. But instead of driving home any kind of moral lessons or preaching political preferences, Updike just makes a funny story out of these situations. Too often fiction has underlying agendas which overwhelm and overshadow the story. At times this is good, but usually it is annoying. Updike does nothing of the sort in this book, there is just good fiction and good laughs. I look forward to reading some of Updike's other stuff, as he is a very talented and enjoyable writer.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All Animals Are Equal..., May 5, 2003
This review is from: The Coup (Hardcover)
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 authors 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 worlds 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 cant help themselves and were all fiddling while Rome burns. Updikes unique strength (his obvious talent aside) is that hes one of the few writers who sees this and points it out, without offering any sort of optimism, solution or last chance. Certainly, hes 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 Kushs 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 Kushs 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.
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