A novel of pre-war politics and the dawn of the American Empire. Three men, the son of a newspaper tycoon, an aging but hale senator and the senator's poor but ambitious aide cross from the corridors of power on Capitol Hill to the drawing rooms of power in the surrounding city. Titanic events in the world at large dwarf them, but they are at the heart of the political and cultural elite and the poison and futility of politics is matched by their squalid family dealings.

It won't come as a surprise to a modern reader, wheeling and dealing, the back-biting and back-stabbing, the scandalous private behaviour of public moral stalwarts, the cynical manufacturing of an imaginary politician for an unscrupulous and hollow man to inhabit. If anything, we expect worse in this day and age. We expect, nay demand greater depths of depravity plumbed by our corrupt overlords. Nonetheless, this is an accomplished, poised and insightful novel. What surprised me was the reserve of the prose. I expected wit and venom in every word, but Vidal confines the verbals to dialogue or reported speech or the thoughts of our protagonists, and this certainly gives the novel a literary gravity without sacrificing the odd scathing phrase.

Note-perfect thriller, building a sense of going somewhere truly and uniquely terrible, without giving any real indication of where it is until you get there. Lansdale makes it look simple: there really isn't a sense that this has been plotted or constructed, as one things happens and then another with crazy but remorseless logic, yet it all purrs like a well-oiled engine. It's character-driven, inasmuch as the characters are definitely driven to keep going to the end and do what they feel needs to be done. Superb.