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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
There is a lot of talk in "Checkpoint" about innocent civilian casualties and dead children to drive home the point that war is inhuman. There is no nice way to say this, but it seems to me that citing the innocent dead -- who are a fact of every war from the most justifiable to the most wanton -- is among the laziest ways you can come up with for opposing war. We should be sickened by the killing of innocents and should realize how inadequate it sounds in the face of human death to say that sometimes people have to die to prevent larger evils. We should also realize that, while always inadequate, it isn't always false.
That's the reality that Baker, in his niceness, cannot countenance. He knows that war is foremost and finally an inhumanity. But he resists sullying himself by even suggesting the existence of a possibility where someone of good conscience violates his sense of what's humane and decent by believing that sometimes violence may, despite the old homily, solve some things.
There is a model for how a novel can face that reality without turning into propaganda, without sacrificing a sense of humanity: Geoffrey Household's 1939 thriller "Rogue Male." Household's story is about a well-off Englishman who travels to a foreign country (read: Germany) to assassinate its leader (read: Hitler). He fails, manages to escape, and arrives back in England to find that a German agent has been sent to kill him. Since Britain is not at war with Germany, he cannot turn to the British authorities without being returned to Nazi Germany.
"Rogue Male" can be enjoyed as one of the most exciting thrillers ever written. It can also be read as a deadly serious proposal made in disgust at Neville Chamberlain and "peace in our time." Household ends the book with the words, "I begin to see where I went wrong the first time ... One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat: and the natural habitat of man is -- in these days -- a town ... My plans are far advanced. I shall not get away alive, but I shall not miss; and that is really all that matters to me any longer."
It's easy to read that now as another historical what-if, the way we enjoy a Ken Follett novel. But when Household wrote that passage he was calmly laying out the most logical and successful manner for killing a real person, and he was saying that the murder of that person was the only way to preserve a reasonable concept of humanity and civilization.
I'm not saying that Baker would have written a better book had he advocated the murder of George W. Bush. I don't believe killing Bush would make the world a better place, and I don't believe Baker does either. But he's written a book that toys with the idea of killing Bush, and that toys with ideas about the Americans and Iraqis who have already been killed, without ever confronting the moral seriousness of either. Baker writes from a height nearly as removed as Wieseltier's, a very comfortable perch where inhumanity is something to be clucked over, not an abyss that must, at some point, be stared into.
"Checkpoint" is a bad book and finally a spineless one. Its shame isn't that it features a character who speaks in favor of assassinating a president but that it treats such a dire act and such a dire moment in our political history as occasion for another Nicholson Baker novelty performance, another opportunity to trot out the decent, ordinary nebbishes who populate his world. The world of "Checkpoint" turns American liberals into the inhabitants of a petting zoo.
