Customer Reviews

The Coup

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

I read this book years ago when it was new, but it jumped back into my head the other day and I decided to write my thoughts on it.

I think this novel stands among Updike's better works and I wonder if it might resonate again in today's world. This novel was written after a decade of unrest in Africa when the dictators and coups were a semiannual occurence. Well, unfortuately, the world is starting to look like those days again.

Updike's genius in this novel was that he distilled the characters down to the essential elements necessary for the plot. That is would makes this novel comic at the same time it is about violence, corruption and oppression. Many people will find the character treatment to be thin. I believe the characters read like people in a news artcile on purpose. To keep the reader from identifying too closely.

I have always really liked John Updike and I think this is an excellent, and different, example of his work. I highly recommend it.

In this dry, black comedy, Updike dares to try to make us sympathize with a Marxist African dictator - and is largely successful. Talk about chutzpah! Colonel Felix Hakim Ellellou, U.S.-educated, Islamic, and rabidly anti-American, is the self-appointed president of the fictional country of Kush, which has been suffering from drought ever since his ascension to office. By allowing Ellellou to tell his own story, Updike makes it easy for us to relate to him, even as we marvel at the depth of his follies. The story begins with the decision to execute the deposed king, which pays off later when Ellellou goes off on a quest to find the king's severed head which is supposedly fomenting revolution in a remote cave. In between, we find out some things about the man behind the uniform.

As allowed by Islamic law, Ellellou has four wives: the older woman he married in his youth, the white woman he brought back from his schooling in America, the more modern, athletic woman of his maturity, and a stunning beauty of a trophy wife. The scenes in America that describe his courtship of wife #2 are incredibly awkward and funny, and are more representative of what we normally expect from Updike. The other major source of humor is Ellellou's mad-dog hatred of western culture. He even goes so far as to immolate a foreign aid worker bringing foodstuffs to alleviate the famine that has struck the land, believing it better to let his people suffer than to accept help from the evil West. Of course Updike intimates that Africa's steaming jungles and desiccated deserts are the real enemy, and puny mankind needs all the help he can get if he is to survive there. Ultimately Ellellou is betrayed by the people he trusts, but they prove far more forgiving of his failures than he was of others'.

This was an interesting read, perhaps more due to the unfamiliarity of the subject matter than any special empathy on Updike's part, although it is beautifully written. In many ways the book leans toward fable rather than realism. Updike's standard suburban neurotics are replaced with figures of legend, almost of myth, so rather than develop these characters, he chooses just to reveal them in all their frailty. So don't read this book expecting a serious treatment of life in contemporary Africa, but rather to get a peek at an American intellectual's perception of Africa during the Cold War, for whatever that's worth.

Sometimes there are novels that are almost too clever, too sophisticated, and too worldly. This is one such novel. Updike weaves African colonialism, Islam, the cold war, socialism, capitalism, and exploitation of every variety into a novel with a few too many characters that are explored just enough to make them into 2 dimensional cartoons of real human beings. Now that you have heard the worst, let me tell you why I gave it 4 stars.

Updike does not really explore character in this novel but rather explores the role of a fictional African president in a fictional African nation caught between the United States and the Soviet Union in a cold war satire. Felix, the President, has the 4 wives allowed by Islam, and a section of the book devoted to each wife, as well as an upwardly mobile mistress, characterize various aspects of African development and cultural change. Felix, a brilliant man who was educated in the United States, returns to Africa with a radical wife in full rebellion against her conservative parents, and continually carries a chip on his should comprised of resentment at the marginalization he felt by being a black man in the United States. But despite Felix's desire to rule over a pristine African state, free of the influences of the United States and capitalism, it keeps creeping back in to infiltrate the nation.

Possibly the most insightful and valuable aspects of the book were the opinions of the United States held by and voiced by many of the main characters. Updike tries to give us a quick view of our selves as Americans. Is some ways the book was a political satire, exploring how power is transferred in other cultures. Felix is a bruised idealist. His pride has been hurt and he seeks solutions in Islam and socialism for the ills of his country. Updike shows that capitalism and the consumer culture that arises from capitalism is indeed a mighty foe when compared to Islam and socialism.

There are a few wonderful scenes in the book including Felix's first meeting with his white future mother-in-law and father-in-law in the United States; or the discovery of the head of the past monarch speaking from a cave to pilgrims while being manipulated by the Soviets; or Felix's return to anonymous status as a cook in a diner while hiding behind the new name of Flapjack.

I found the book to be witty with impressive use of the English language. Yet it never was poetic. I found the characters to be developed only to the level where they were allowed to make commentary for Updike but never developed to the point where there was any emotional connection between these characters that seemed like suspects in a 1960's version of a detective show on television. I found I read the book with a smirk on my face from all the tongue-in-cheek international political commentary that may or may not have really be reflective of African reality.

This is a fascinating book told (switching seemingly at random between third and first person) of a character quite literally torn in two. The other reviewers here seem, almost to a one, to be transfixed by puzzling out whether Updike has caught what the "real" Africa is like, whatever that might mean. This question is by-the-bye. The pertinent question is whether Updike has accurately captured the soul of the "unhappy" Felix Ellellou (as Updike wryly dubs him). "Felix" is Latin for happy. I think the answer is, on the whole: Yes, quite well.

There are actually two coups here. The first occurs when Ellellou beheads with a scimitar the king and former father figure to him. The decapitation, described by its perpetrator, is a wonder in slow-motion, hallucinatory prose, of which the following is an example:

"I lifted the sword high, so that the reflection from its flashing blade hurtled around the square like a hawk of lethal brightness, slicing the eyes of the crowd and the hardened clay of the facades, the shuttered fearful windows, the blanched, pegged walls and squat aspiring minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster." P.72

And it goes on. The second coup occurs at the end, where Ellellou himself is deposed rather than beheaded, pensioned off to France to write his memoirs, which, of course, comprise this book.

The pith of these memoirs occurs when Ellellou, with one of his wives, takes a harrowing trip to the northeast of his country. Here we learn, in flashbacks, of his upbringing: His stint in the French Army during the French-Indochina War (which, for those unaware, marked the beginning of the Vietnam War) to his study at an American college in Wisconsin where, much to his chagrin, he was Americanised more than he wants to admit to himself. What occurs during this trek is the final break-up of any sort of self-identity. He is torn between African animism and Islam (to which he was converted in America), between French military esprit de corps and individualistic Western notions, between the integrity (as he imagines it) of his native Kush and the irruption of oil-greedy Americans into it. I can't put it better than those seeking his downfall put it into the mouth of the stolen skull of the decapitated king in a rather macabre episode:

"...his political war, which causes him to burn gifts of food and assassinate those functionaries who bring these gifts, is in truth a war within himself, for which the innocent multitudes suffer." P.212

So, the prospective reader is thinking, another mad African dictator, why should I bother? For a number of reasons, I should say, but primarily because you'll come to understand what makes them mad and even sympathise with them. You will actually come to see a bit of you in them, or at least the one depicted here. As Felix poses it:

"But who, in the world, now, does not live between two worlds?"p.62

Who indeed?

This novel has some interesting points, however I sense that Mr. Updike did not spend much time on it.

The Rabbit novels are excellent. However, "The Coup" seemed like a practice draft for this otherwise accomplished author.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"