The Manchurian Candidate

Raymond Shaw returns from Korea with the Medal of Honor and an account of his own heroism that his surviving patrol all repeat in identical language, and that none of them believes when they examine it.

His commanding officer begins having the same nightmare. The patrol was captured, taken to Manchuria and conditioned, and Raymond was prepared as a weapon.

Every man in the patrol tells the same story about him, and none of them can remember why.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's target is American domestic politics rather than communism: a demagogic senator whose anti-communist crusade is manufactured, managed by his wife, and useful to the people he claims to oppose.

The McCarthy parallel is explicit and the book's central argument — that the apparatus of anti-communism was itself the vulnerability — is delivered with considerable venom.

It is far stranger and funnier than its reputation: the prose is baroque, the digressions are extensive, and the satire frequently tips into farce.

Condon writes in a mannered, hyperbolic register that readers expecting a straight thriller find disorienting, and it is the book's most distinctive quality.

Eleanor Iselin is the novel's real antagonist: controlling, incestuously attached to her son, politically ruthless and considerably more intelligent than anyone around her.

She is among the most effective villains in American fiction, and the revelation of her actual role is the book's central turn.

The brainwashing material draws on contemporary reporting about Korean prisoner-of-war treatment, and the novel treats it with more confidence than the evidence supported.

The mechanism is implausible as psychology and effective as metaphor, which is a reasonable description of the book's relationship to fact generally.

The trigger is a game of solitaire and a specific card, which is an excellent device: portable, innocuous and possible to deploy in a room without anyone noticing.

The image has entered the culture, and its cleanness is part of why the novel has outlasted its political moment.

The officer who begins to remember is the closest thing to a conventional protagonist, and his investigation supplies the plot's forward motion.

He is considerably less interesting than Raymond or his mother, which is a structural weakness the novel largely gets away with. Condon also gives him a romance that arrives abruptly and is written in a register so strange that critics have argued for decades about whether it is intentional.

The book belongs to a specific American tradition in which the threat is domestic, the institutions are compromised, and the conspiracy is legible only to someone who appears unwell.

Its influence on that tradition is substantial, and a great deal of later political fiction descends from it.

Condon was later shown to have lifted passages from Robert Graves's I, Claudius, and he acknowledged the borrowing when it was identified.

The fact is part of the book's record. It does not affect the novel's construction, and readers are entitled to know about it.

John Frankenheimer's 1962 adaptation is faithful and superb, and a 2004 version relocates the plot to corporate rather than communist manipulation.

The 1962 film is the version most people know. The novel is considerably funnier and its satire is broader and more specific. The 1962 version was also withdrawn from circulation for many years, which contributed a great deal to its later reputation when it returned.

The Cold War specifics are historical, and several of the novel's attitudes, particularly toward its female characters, are of their period.

The central argument about manufactured threats being useful to the people who manufacture them has aged extremely well. The novel's account of a media environment that rewards the loudest accusation rather than the best-evidenced one has also become considerably more legible.

Readers who want political satire with a thriller's structure, and who enjoy prose that draws attention to itself.

It is stranger than its reputation and is worth reading for the mother alone. Readers expecting the film's cool tone will find the book considerably more unhinged.