About halfway through reading Paul Lussier's Last Refuge of Scoundrels (2000) it occurred to me this might be a novel that could have made a lot of very pompous people extremely . . . well, cwoss. So, out of curiosity, I checked the book's page on Amazon, specifically the reader reviews. Sure enough, about the second of these played that old politically-motivated-Amazon-reviewer trick of attempting to avoid rebuttal by attacking the book not on ideological grounds (the true reason the reviewer hates it) but for something else altogether. If the something else is a genuine flaw in the book, you have a chance that folk won't immediately see what you're up to. Otherwise . . .
It's a method of sliming that one of our political parties in particular has turned into an artform. You know how it goes. Don't like someone publicizing a lie about Niger yellowcake? Okay, you "out" his wife and claim he was only in Africa on a nepotistic junket. The media bozoes are too dim to point out that this is irrelevant to the issue at hand and anyway false. The funny thing is that I think the people perusing the Amazon reader reviews are a bit smarter than the Beltway pundits, because they seem to pick up pretty quickly on the "reviewers" who try to pull this sort of stunt.
Anyway, this particular "reviewer" decided to claim the book was so abysmally written that you could be reading for what seemed like hours and then be startled to discover you were only ten pages further on. I laughed aloud on discovering the comment, for Last Refuge of Scoundrels is almost disgustingly readable: my own complaint about it was that it was making me put the light out far later than I intended, keeping me immured in the lav far longer than I should be, and so forth.
The general writing style and indeed subject matter kept reminding me of John Barth, and in particular of his 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor. Lussier's novel is significantly less, um, smutty than The Sot-Weed Factor, but it has that same habit of on occasion juxtaposing bawdry and earthy deflation with a cold-blooded treatment of quite strong material; it's not so much that human suffering becomes regarded as acceptable, more simply that it is accepted in a way that's unsettling, I suspect (and hope!), to many of us today. Lussier isn't quite as sure a prose artist as Barth; to make up for it, much of the cruel stuff he's describing is historically accurate, and one suspects that a great deal of the deflation of historical conceits is equally on the mark.
The premises of Last Refuge of Scoundrels include that the American War of Independence and the American Revolution are two quite different things, and that the conflation of the two terms into supposed synonymy is a mistake; aside from anything else, the American Revolution is something that is (or should be) still continuing -- it's not just an historical event but an idea. An idea that can, alas, be all too easily hijacked, as we today know to our cost, but which, the novel has it, was hijacked also at the time . . . notably by the vast majority of those whom we now revere as the Founding Fathers. These gents are portrayed as venal, corrupt, small-minded, ignorant of the historical importance of the events going on around them, and deliberately or unwittingly among the greatest of the obstacles the American Revolution had to overcome if it were to succeed; especially singled out for demolition are John Hancock, the two Adamses (Samuel in particular -- I'll never look at the beer named after him in quite the same way again!) and Ben Franklin. Instead, the engine driving the Revolution was a young whore, Deborah Simpson, aided by her would-be swain John Lawrence and with the active collusion of George Washington.
Deborah is, it's quite clearly laid out in the novel, a personification of the countless thousands of average Americans who rose up together to oust the tyrant, whether that tyrant be Brit or homegrown; Washington's genius lay in his ability to recognize, unlike almost all the rest of his Founding Father cohorts, the importance of the Deborahs and of the Revolution that the Deborahs were bringing about, and in his facilitating of their Revolution. "Facilitating"? More to the point for much of the time was that he simply let them get on with it. Washington's failure, by contrast, lay in his inability, once the War of Independence was over and the British expelled, to permit the Revolution to go the whole hog and actually reify the ideals laid out so loftily in the Declaration of Independence -- notably the ideal that all men should be regarded as created equal.
I'm allowing myself to be distracted by the novel's underpinning when really what I want to do is talk about the book as a "reading experience", or whatever. Well, what I found Last Refuge of Scoundrels to be was a wonderful, exhilarating romp, a novel that I read with a broad grin plastered across my silly mug for almost the whole of the time. I'm not sure if it's a revisionist history (well, it obviously is in terms of its central plot, as John and Deborah weasel and scheme to often near-miraculous effect, but I mean as a whole) or a long-overdue attempt to reassess (a) what actually went on during those few globally important years in the latter part of the 18th century, and (b) the personages involved. As the primary narrator, John Lawrence, several times observes, history isn't so much a sequence of events as the stories people create using those events as jumping-off points. In that context, this is as valid a history of the War of Independence/American Revolution as any other; and my guess is that, in the broad canvas even if not in the details, it's a far more valid version of the reality than is to be found in many a history textbook. But if you leave all of that aside you still have a great rollicking yarn.
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