From the President to the Politburo
This originally appeared in The Declaration on 2 February 2006.
Some animals are more equal than others: At first blush, one might think George Saunders’ new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is just a political allegory for early twenty-first century America. There’s the vaguely fascistic despot, Phil, who (a) speaks best when his brain is removed from his head, (b) responds to violence with greater violence, (c) takes the presidency of his country by undemocratic means, (d) enforces loyalty oaths on his constituents and (e) steals every last resource of a bordering nation. There’s the populace who follow his every decree enthusiastically, eating up the drivel he spouts about their great nation. And there’s the “media”—three guys with bullhorns—who try desperately to report on all these actions, but instead have a case of ADHD and like to talk out their anuses. Sound like any country you know?
Like that other political allegory against totalitarianism that you might have read back in high school, Saunders uses simple language and distinctly inhuman characters to get his point across. Where Orwell used animals to obvious effect (the animals most in favor of the socialization of the farm are, ahem, the sheep), Saunders characters don’t even seem alive. One Inner Hornerite consists of a tuna can, a belt buckle, a blue dot and some connecting parts; another resembles a bald letter C with antlers and side vents to breathe. The Outer Hornerites are as odd, with a presidential advisor who is just a mirror with shady eyes.
The plot is just as insistently abstract. Inner Horner is completely surrounded by the nation of Outer Horner, and it’s only big enough to hold one of it’s citizens at a time. The other citizens wait outside, in an area termed the “Short Term Residency Zone.” When Inner Horner shrinks, stranding the occupying citizen in Outer Horner, all hell breaks loose. The Outer Hornerites tax the Inner Hornerites within an inch of their lives, there’s a coup, and everything the Inner Hornerites do is suddenly interpreted as an attack.
Considering how weird all of this is, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is probably Saunders’ most immediately accessible work. The language is simple and the characters seem to have a fairly one-to-one relationship to reality. There are no ghosts, no children with memory implants that speak in a denatured English—just what appears to be a simplistic allegory about the state of democracy in America today. There’s nothing as seriously challenging as the stories in Pastoralia or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The entire book can be read in about forty-five minutes, and re-read faster if you’re on deadline.
But as the story continues, it starts to resist these easy comparisons. Saunders writes conclusions to his stories that do more than simply resolve the plot, happy ending or not. He often includes a twist at the end—not a “Finally I can sit and read all of these books oh no my glasses broke!” type of twist, but a more subtle one that forces the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about what has come before. Slowly, the one-to-one correspondence between Phil and that guy about ninety miles from here falls apart. Another nation, Greater Keller, is introduced: Greater Keller launches an attack to force regime change in Outer Horner; they measure their national wealth through a statistic called the National Life Enjoyment Index Score. Sound like any country you know?
Unfortunately, if you’re reading for the politics, this will probably be a case of too little, too late. By this point, we’re already two-thirds of the way through the book. Saunders’ blurring of the lines doesn’t really add anything to a reader?s understanding of the characters, who remain mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, since an even bigger deus ex machina is soon in coming. What it does do is change the point of the allegory considerably: The book’s not against totalitarianism (well, yeah, okay, it is), it’s not against communism or capitalism or anything so crass. It’s an argument against partisan violence that?s as true in this country as any other. Every satirist is an idealist at heart, after all.
There’s a problem with all of this, however. It’s that reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as allegory is so reductive that it erases everything someone should be reading fiction for. The allegory’s just there to enhance the humor, really: when one realizes that the media folk have a mouth by their ass, it’s so over-the-top that one can’t help but laugh. When Phil wins over the Outer Hornerites by a “stentorian” speech after his brain falls out, the chuckle that follows is just as involuntary. The novella contains a comic universe that’s only funnier because of its odd intersections with reality. (Which is really the definition of satire, after all.)
It helps that Saunders is able to free his prose from the constraints of reality, too; there’s nothing to keep the words on the page, and it flows from laughter to anger to just pretty in a matter of a few sentences. On an uninhabited part of Outer Horner, he writes that it was “a lush verdant zone where cows’ heads grew out of the earth shouting sarcastic things at anyone who passed, which, though lush and verdant, was unpopulated because the cows’ sarcasm was so withering.” There are illustrations, too—always a little odd in an “adult” work of fiction—by Benjamin Gibson, but they suit the story quite well. They help the reader imagine the very odd characters that Saunders envisions, and at the same time have an odd beauty all to themselves.
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a sharp little book—a quick read that won’t change your mind on any of those pressing political issues that divide the nation, but it will keep you chuckling as you go along. It’s not Animal Farm (and thank God for that). It’s a satire that keeps stretching at the boundaries of what satire can do, far more than a condemnation of Bush or Hitler or totalitarianism. Because even if all allegories were equal, some would still be more equal than others.