Guest review by Simon Edge: SQUEEZE ME by Carl Hiaasen

 

"In normal circumstances the whole thing would be cartoonishly implausible, but the tragedy of our times is that it’s never been more believable."

Simon Edge is the author of four novels. His fifth, The End of the World is Flat, is out from Lightning Books in August

Were it not for the farcical Florida recount in the 2000 Presidential election, I might never have begun my love affair with the novels of Carl Hiaasen.

Back then, an election that hung on whether voters had successfully punched out all the cardboard from a perforated ballot, or left some of it still dangling, was the most absurd that US politics had ever got. I remember Hiaasen, interviewed on Radio 4, explaining that this might seem weird to the rest of the world, but it was normal for the nuthouse that was the Sunshine State.

He was the Miami Herald journalist who reinvented himself writing angry comedy thrillers about Florida, channelling his fury at the destruction of the Everglades into satirical tales of venality and corruption. As a rule, the crooks’ greed is only surpassed by their rampaging imbecility, and a Hiaasen hero – usually some kind of crime-busting Crocodile Dundee – is on hand to ensure the villains get a horrific comeuppance, often with the help of some of the fiercer creatures from Florida’s vanishing wilderness.

After I heard him on the radio I started binge-reading Hiaasen, and he’s an influence on some of my own dafter plots. But it’s been a while, so it was a joy to complete a personal full circle in the wake of another presidential election with a strong Florida angle.

Squeeze Me opens at a fundraising ball on the billionaire island enclave of Palm Beach, where a rich Republican widow – and fawning devotee of her near neighbour, the 45th President – goes missing. When her body turns up buried in concrete, a blameless Honduran immigrant called Diego Beltrán is arrested. The President – referred to throughout the novel by his secret-service codename the Mastodon – whips up his supporters by turning ‘No More Diegos’ into a racist campaign slogan.

The Crocodile Dundee here is a tough-but-hot ex-con wildlife handler called Angie Armstrong. Teaming up with an honest local cop and an agent on the Mastodon’s detail, she establishes that no human killed the widow. Unfortunately that won’t help Diego, whom the President and his chanting supporters require to be guilty. Angie is determined to get him released.

There’s also the ongoing problem of an infestation of man-eating Burmese pythons – the titular squeezers – in the Palm Beach area. The one-eyed eco-warrior ‘Skink’, an old Hiaasen favourite, may or may not have a hand in it.

All the maestro’s usual ingredients are here: merciless satire on ignorant, filthy-rich incomers to Florida; a parade of inept crooks and hoodlums offing each other through bovine incompetence; heroic champions of decency and justice with more sympathy for the animal and reptile population than the ever-swelling human one; and a gloriously chaotic climax in which greed, vanity and preening arrogance get their just deserts.

The added zing here comes with the Trump connection. The President and First Lady are not just an off-stage presence but central characters: he with monstrously rolling gut, a daily regime of laxatives and a dependence on erectile treatments; she with granite indifference to everything but her hunky secret-service lover.

A good deal of the plot takes place in Casa Bellicosa, a thinly disguised Mar-a-Lago, which is the scene of an unforgettable set-piece showdown featuring super-sized pythons tripping on acid and a malfunctioning tanning bed. It’s Hiaasen at his absurd, grotesque best.

In normal circumstances the whole thing would be cartoonishly implausible, but the tragedy of our times is that it’s never been more believable. If we’ve learned nothing else from the past few years, we can at least all agree that the best satire is documentary.

On that score, Hiaasen and Trump are a match made in heaven.


Squeeze Me is published by Sphere

Guest review by John Bowers: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED by John Bolton

                                           

"This is a President truly addicted to chaos ... ”

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

John Bolton is a polarising but significant figure. One suspects he could achieve an argument in a paper bag. He is a significant player in the Trump Circus because he was originally lauded by him as a great cold warrior who would make America’s enemies quake (having seen him as a regular commentator on Fox News). Gradually in office, Bolton became disillusioned with surely the most eccentric if not dangerous Commander in Chief in US history. He lasted as National Security Advisor only from 2018 to 2019. He resigned but the President, who is not one to allow people to leave with dignity, claimed that he had dismissed him, ostensibly for being too much of a war-monger. 

A great feature of the book is Bolton’s ability to contrast this Administration with that of George W Bush, where he held the post of US Ambassador to the UN; he had also served Bush Senior and Reagan. Unlike them, this is a President who has no sense of history, does not read much and does little to prepare for significant summit meetings. One does not sleep easily with him as Leader of the Free World. 

The book is the first insider’s account of Trump’s love in with the North Korean dictator. Trump adored a letter written apparently by Kim Jong Un. In fact it was Bolton says written by his underlings “as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self esteem”. Trump clearly wanted to meet Kim for the photo-op but did not read his briefings and was bested by Kim even though Kim had less cards to play and a smaller nuclear button (as Trump had once pointed out). This is at one with a disturbing kow-towing to other dictators or authoritarian figures whether they be Putin, Xi or Erdogan.

Trump’s ignorance as revealed by Bolton is truly extraordinary. As examples he thought Finland was part of Russia and he had no idea that the UK was a nuclear power. It is Trump’s attitude to Russia which is the most troubling, perplexing and difficult to explain. It is hard to understand why he would want to ensure that all but interpreters were absent from a meeting he insisted be held with Putin. As Bolton says “I was not looking forward to leaving him in a room alone with Trump”. Trump’s desire to see everything in terms of his own interest, especially his desire for re election but also commercial, is very worrying.

Bolton’s description of a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China is a classic. Xi read arduously note cards hashed out in advance while Trump ad libbed “with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next”. Xi ingratiated himself with Trump by saying he looked forward to working with him for another six years, at which point Trump said people were saying the two-term limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Trump then asked Xi to help him win the next election by alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns. Of course relations have now taken a turn for the worse with mutual allegations now filling the air.

The book also covers in detail the coup to topple Maduro in Venezuela which never quite happened. Iran, the Taliban, G7 meetings and getting Europeans to pay more for their defence are other themes which run through the work. Bolton provides some rare insights such as that he recalls that “Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals” in particular those of Barbara Bush and John McCain, with whom he continued his petty squabble well after his death.

Bolton also sheds some light into the naked and ruthless media management of the Trump team. For example, he rushed out a statement on Saudi Arabia because this will “divert from Ivanka” who had been accused of using her personal e mail for government business.

This is a President truly “addicted to chaos” as the book blurb states. This is a truly dysfunctional White House and it is difficult to see why any rational person would want to work there. The book richly demonstrates how the daily tweets get in the way of developing rational foreign policy. 

The Democrats wanted to call Bolton to appear in the impeachment process. He does not quite deal with why he did not agree to testify and instead saved up his revelations for this no doubt lucrative book although he does aim probably merited criticism at the way the process was handled.

Bolton has few good words to say about anyone and has contempt for the idea that Trump was originally surrounded by an “axis of adults”. He takes aim at the inadequacies as he saw them of Mattis, Pompeo and Tillerson and is scathing about Nicky Haley, the Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton has a racy style and his insight into foreign policy in the past is illuminating. His overall verdict on Trump is “he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the federal government”. It is hard not to agree and the evidence is clearly presented in the book’s 577 pages.

The Room Where It Happened is published by Simon and Schuster.

See also: John Bowers' review of Tribes by David Lammy.