Volume 10, Number 8 · April 25, 1968
Satirical Pastoral
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
The Triumph: A Novel of Modern Diplomacy
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Houghton-Mifflin, 256 pp., $4.95
Judged as a light novel, The Triumph makes very pleasant and sometimes hilarious reading. It is rather closely related to Our Man in Havana and The Comedians; more distantly to Scoop and Harold Nicholson's Public Faces. It is a good English tradition and The Triumph is in some ways a rather unAmerican work. The author seems, to a surprising degree, a stranger in the Washington world he describes; no doubt that world has always had its Anglophile tradition, but this is not the manner of an American Anglophile; this eye is not only ironic but perceptibly alien. Mr. Galbraith has been an Ambassador of the United States, but as a writer he is a Canadian of English nostalgia. As such he belongs spiritually more to the world over which America dominates than to the world of the dominators. The detachment, and a faint latent repugnance, which this position implies seem to enhance his sense of the ridiculous and give an edge to his prose, applied to some of the activities of some of our rulers.
Review, 1910 words
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