Until about three quarters of the way through [Captains and the Kings] I more or less knew what I should be writing about. Now I am not so sure. It seemed to be one of those capacious dramatic tales of the American dollar dream in the tradition of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane. 'Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through the dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850's and he was a penniless immigrant, an orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister.' And he does, although the brother turns out to be a homosexual concert tenor and the sister a nun. Joseph's childhood humiliation makes him bitter and his bitterness makes him cruelly determined. His mania to reach the top devours him and all who cross his path, excepting his mistress. With his ruthless disregard for other people which is always necessary in accumulating great wealth, he does grow vastly rich, from oil and newspapers, gunrunning and brothels, and he grows very brutal in his use of that frightening political power which will obviously accompany it. Private riches on this lurid scale can and must buy everything which is of this every-day world, including Washington. This is the ultimate trophy Armagh covets for his son. The Presidency of a country which once spat upon him…. The story is rich in incident and character, complex in structure, and written with a strong narrative urgency which carries one forward without wasting breath. If the above outline should appear off-putting I ask you to ignore it because this is a solid and awesome book, worth anybody's time….
Captains and the Kings should become known as an addition to epic American literature—it has all the qualifications, muscularity above all—but its intentions go far beyond this and only become truly apparent towards the end. And it has unnerved me. Frightened me, I could say. This is a persuasive realist novel which draws you in and makes you believe in its fiction. When towards the end it moves, we are assured, into the region of fact that belief carries on through, and what it has to say is disturbing. When was the last time you read a novel which explicitly tries to save the world? (p. 105)
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