Harlot's Ghost,

*SPOILER ALERT*  JFK gets assassinated

 

In my circle the CIA sits pretty well synonymous with evil.  It's like KRS-1 (who incidentally isn't amongst my circle of friends) said, Criminals In Action.  To read Mailer is to see the agency as a brand, like a Wu-Tang Clan where Method Man might not know exactly what Ghostface is up to.  In fact RZA and GZA might be at work undermining U-God unawares that they are actually puppets to Inspectah Deck's master plan.  They may work under the same umbrella, but the ship sails on the winds of leverage and everybody is keeping secrets from everybody.  Yes, just like a hip hop group, only they work on the public dime and topple democratically elected governments.

      

      The story is told through the eyes of a young company man named Herrick who stems from New England mid level aristocracy, who through 2 parts nepotism and 1 part talent gets his fingers in a lot of messy pies, from Berlin in the fifties to rubbing shoulders with KGB big wigs in Montevideo up to the Bay of Pigs invasion and John Kennedy's most famous visit to Dallas.  Herrick is moral, tough, reserved, loves America and is mainly confused by the deviance and chicanery that surrounds him and chips at his weakest parts.

Apart from a host of interesting superiors and peers, Herrick really takes his orders from his Dad Cal (who between running the far east and the Castro assassination party planning finds time to arm wrestle Hemingway and obsess over the great American obituary page) and Harlot.  The title character is easily the book's most intriguing.  Harlot is a spy's spy who seems to know everything about everyone, has the run of the entire agency, and just might be completely insane, or worse, a soviet.  The better part of the book is presented as secret correspondence between our narrator and Harlot's wife, who is understood to have divorced her husband for his underling after the events of the novel.

Apart from showing equal parts disdain and admiration for the Central Intelligence Agency, Mailer explores the idea of strong personalities steering history with grandeur and often with spite.  We are led to believe that perhaps the whole course of American history could be wiggling under Harlot's thumb.  A large and amoral character who acts as a philosophical foil to Herrick named Dix Butler sums it up neatly when he expresses his hatred for Castro.  Not on the grounds of his revolution, but under the understanding that Castro has accomplished more than him in the same time.  The fearless Butler explains that there can be only twenty or so amazing men in the world, and that he is setting to work on being number one.

This of course is contrasted with the convolution of politics, self important but petty double agents, and most importantly, Oswald.  Mailer doesn't give any serious credence to conspiracy theories concerning JFK's death, but the slim possibilities are insidious and so many that his narrator chooses to believe in a long gunman because the alternative would mean a quick fall into insanity.

It is worth noting that this theme is taken up in Mailer's last novel The Castle and The Forest where a fictitious article written by Mark Twain laments the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth in Geneva.  Albeit with a more religious bend, there is a greater theme that weighs pettiness and chaos against the machinations of powerful men.

The novel opens up on a cliff hanger that is never resolved and even after 1200 odd pages promises "to be continued."  Not too many of the greatest American novelists get to pull a Back to the Future ending and hold their title, but I'm willing to let it slide if you are.