By RICHARD CONDON (Signet; 1959)
The word for this quasi-satirical brainwashing thriller is dated. You probably know THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, like many of the novels of its prolific author (who also provided the source material for WINTER KILLS and PRIZZI’S HONOR), for the famous 1962 movie adapted from it, and that’s as it should be. That movie, directed by John Frankenheimer, is a justified classic, while the novel is what it is. It’s not bad, mind you, just several decades past its prime.
Written in the “bestseller” style of the 1950s, it’s overdone and lugubrious, albeit not entirely without worth. The protagonist, a journalist-soldier named Raymond Shaw, is an extremely well rounded personage, although that’s part of the problem. This is a novel in which characterization comes at the expense of narrative drive, especially in the early pages. In true old-timey fashion Condon spends much of the novel’s first third introducing us to Raymond, a good looking but troubled young man who proves an extremely receptive subject for the communist aggressors who capture Raymond and several of his fellow soldiers during the Korean War, and brainwash them in Manchuria. Raymond is apparently a “resenter,” the ideal type of brainwashee because “the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the best assassins.”
The brainwashing sequence, as staged by Frankenheimer and cinematographer James Wong Howe, was the highlight of the MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE film, in which a roomful of sweet old Caucasian ladies were presented to the deluded soldiers–and the audience–whereas in actuality those ladies were Russian and Chinese operators turning the men into programmed assassins. Here the corresponding sequence isn’t nearly as interesting, being a more straightforward set of events that lacks the old ladies (and utilizes Frederic Wertham’s SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT as a source) and concludes with the observation that the men’s brains “had not merely been washed, they had been dry-cleaned.”
Further voluminous characterization is expended on Raymond’s mother Eleanor, an uber-bitch who’s in on the brainwashing—and whose bad parenting is responsible for Raymond’s contrary nature. We learn far more about Eleanor here than we do in the film, such as the fact that she divorced her husband when Ray was a child—an apparently scandalous action that demonstrates just how dated this book truly is. It’s quite misogynistic, and not a little racist in its depiction of Chinese agents of evil.
The novel climaxes with Raymond being programmed to carry out the assassination of a presidential candidate so that the latter’s communist-controlled vice president, who just happens to be Eleanor’s husband, can become the candidate. This entails Raymond murdering his fiancée as well, just as his fellow brainwashed soldier pal Marco, who’s managed to overcome his conditioning, races against time to stop the assassination. Obviously the idea of a Presidential candidate controlled by a hostile foreign power is no longer a thing of fiction, a rare area in which THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was actually ahead of its time.