Homeland: A Novel [Hardcover]

Paul William Roberts, best-selling Canadian author of A War Against Truth, has once more crossed the line from non-fiction to novel-with mixed results.
Homeland is a fictional memoir written in 2050 by hundred-year-old former top-level U.S. bureaucrat, David Leverett. Leverett has a long line of wealthy and influential ancestors, and a profound philosophical investment in the founding principles of U.S. democracy.
We begin in a bleak and dystopian future in which the United States of North America (USNA)-with Canada having been swallowed by the U.S.-is the centre of a global empire. Major cities have been turned into theme parks, while the identity of the president has to be kept secret for security reasons. Leverett describes his career from young Etonian in the U.K. where his father was ambassador, to Harvard student and member of the secret A 3 organization. Already groomed for government, he serves the administration during Vietnam, Watergate, and the Carter administration.
After a steady stream of promotions, he gets to witness first-hand the duplicity of a U.S. foreign policy. Leverett details how, for its own ends, the U.S. pushes the U.S.S.R. into invading an Afghanistan already on fire-courtesy of U.S. strategists-with the zeal of jihad. The clear purpose of the governing clique is to create for the lumbering soviet giant a Vietnam-like quagmire from which it would never fully emerge.
The various administrations consistently fail to show “service to morality primarily in our own behaviour, not in our judgement of others,” as Leverett believes they should. This inability of the U.S. to mind its own business culminates in the Iran-Contra deal, whereby profits from the sale of weapons to Iran go to fund Nicaraguan Contra guerrillas intent on overthrowing their country’s democracy. As U.S. ideals slide further into the mud, Leverett finds the departments in which he works increasingly pervaded by immorality.
Recalling verbatim conversations with colleagues, Leverett details the Reagan-era rise of the corporation as political decision-maker:

“The Bechtels are as all-American as you can get,” Luposki said. “They regularly donate hundreds of millions to this country, which they’ve literally helped to build. I for one don’t mind if they get something back.”
“Like what?” I asked. “What do they get back?”
“The ability to participate in decision making, for example,” Luposki said.

The slow erosion of democracy is painstakingly and eloquently charted in Homeland, as is the growth of conspiracy among elites that allows such decay to spread. Threats and staged suicides speckle the backdrop of this political theatre. The penalty for not conforming is chillingly clear.
The political analysis is highly persuasive and ‘Chomsky-esque’ in its relentless logic. But as a novel, Homeland fails to live up to reader expectations precisely at the point where this admirable depth of philosophical and political debate meets the personal inner life of the protagonist.
At the opening of Leverett’s memoir, he tells us that “those who surmise that I have no understanding of the way an ordinary person lives are right.” Before they are far into the story, many readers will begin to understand that this is a device. It’s not merely power or privilege that makes Leverett an irksome narrator. Roberts has forewarned us that a politician is not an “ordinary person,” and, indeed, Leverett’s life journey is about politics to the exclusion of everything else. His own moral despair is indistinguishable from the horror he experiences as he observes the “dismantling of the republic,” and his personal life is entirely subordinate to his political life. Leverett’s weltanschauung has room only for politics.
A rather poetic revisiting of pre-school childhood-that makes him wonder “who could have thought it a good idea to give a child everything for the first few years only to snatch it all back again”-ends with him being packed off to boarding school. From here on, his thoughts and recollections revolve around U.S. foreign policy and the web of philosophies, ancient and modern, upon which concepts of citizenship and government are based.
In one chapter later on, Leverett’s boss expounds his views on Machiavelli and Hobbes for eleven pages with only the occasional puff on a cigar to interrupt the flow. No sooner are we out of this scene when another mentor talks political theory for several more pages, pointing out that modern society needs a “tangible war against evil, though, whether it’s genuine or not doesn’t matter.”
This may well be part of the life fabric of the highly educated politician in Washington, but in a fictional memoir it makes very heavy going. The usual core of human existence-relationships, family, etc.-is given very short shrift by comparison. Roberts dodges questions readers might have concerning his protagonist’s sexuality by implying he has a naturally low libido. This is complemented with the assertion that Leverett’s family “viewed emotions the way other families view contagious disease,” which reads like another evasive manoeuvre enabling Roberts to excuse himself from diluting politics with life.
Leverett marries, but we see little of his relationship with his bride. Instead, we have an account of his father-in-law’s housing and democratising mission in Zaire, a project that leaves Leverett pondering new moral complexities, especially when his forthcoming “Wedding Apocalypse Vow”, involves presidential guests and a NASA-aided display of fireworks which causes birds to desert the area for more than a week.
The appearance of real life figures-Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld-in some of Roberts’s scenes adds a particularly chilling verity to his view of America’s political agenda. But Roberts does not seem at all committed to the form he has chosen. Novels rarely contain sixteen-page policy papers-fictional or otherwise-within their pages; nor do they include a reprinting of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s complete 1961 final address to the nation. Since Homeland has both, there is a persistent sense that its fictional world is being squeezed by real history and polemics.
This is frustrating because when Roberts sketches a meaningful relationship, he does so with insight. The portrait Leverett paints of his patrician father-a man who sets up small trials for his growing boy to test his honesty, who sinks into alcoholism in middle-age and finally gives in to senility in old age-comes close to providing the novel with an emotional spine.
As there is clearly a lesson here, it’s curious Roberts could not bring this relationship to the foreground and let readers draw some their own conclusions about America’s foreign policy and its sphere of influence. Similarly, a semi-estranged mother-by turns angry, and unfocused-is glimpsed by the reader only through lulls in the political discourse. When she hangs up the phone on her son, Leverett comments that since there is “no equivalent in real conversation,” this is not only unpardonably rude, but “an abuse of the medium.” Those who are intrigued by this relationship will have to make do with such nuggets.
Paul Butler (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

The year is 2050. The US is by now a global empire, sealed off from an outside world that has been reduced to a series of wars against several Chinese factions. America is little more than a wasteland. The great cities have disintegrated into memories of a bygone glory. New York has become a tourist haunt and theme park. Washington is the hub for central command operations, and only those on official business ever visit the capital. The president and Vice President, along with the Secretaries of State and Defense, are no longer identified for reasons of national security. There is no sense of the past. History, as we know it, ceases to exist. It is in this grim and terrifying landscape that we find David Leverett, a former government advisor and architect of America’s twentieth century postwar forgeign policy. Having just reached his one hundredth birthday, Leverett confronts his past, chronicling his role in the evolution of the American empire, from the end of the Carter era, to the glory years of the Reagan administration, and finally to the solidification of America’s foreign policy of world domination under the influence of corporations, think tanks and lobbies of the two Bush administrations. Both a testament to and a lament for the country he served, Leverett exposes the backroom politics and players that engineered the destruction of the United States and its rebirth as US-Global, a paranoid super-state and scientific dictatorship with no known centre of power. Bestselling author Paul William Roberts draws on real events and real people, chronicling humanity’s trek toward a dystopian future under the influence of a corrupt American empire. Sweeping in scope and controversial in subject matter, Homeland is Roberts’ deeply disturbing vision of the world to come. “… a personal and passionate attack on the corruption Roberts sees at the heart of America’s imperial ambitions.”— Toro magazine “This particular work of fiction is infused with political philosophy and political science, history and theory, even breaking into Leverett’s policy papers… Roberts’ work is refreshing and necessary.” —TheTyee.ca “…Everything Roberts has been saying for years about Iraq and the Bush administration’s involvement in the Mid West has come true, bit by gloomy bit… Homeland is so dark it makes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale look like a Jim Carrey comedy… The more you listen to the stories Roberts tells, the more Homeland seems less a nightmare vision of a republic run amok than a diary of the day’s events, a chronology of a nightmare unfolding in real time every night on the evening news.” — The Calgary Herald