The book is Ultimatum, a first novel by Matthew Glass, with the first Canadian edition published in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. It first came to my attention in a June issue of The Economist fiction review. They praised it sufficiently as "thoughtful and timely" to warrant a request to my local public library, which had it for me in short order. The jacket blurbs from other authors praise it as "gripping, smart and persuasive", "... it feels probable--if not inevitable." "... The ending will leave you gasping." and "a remarkably intelligent novel."
Although I find the American presidential term intervals and the timing references here and there in the novel a bit confusing, the action narrative, and the interminable meetings all take place within a year. It begins on the evening of U.S election day on November 2, 2032 when Democratic Senator Joe Benton of Arizona is declared winner over one term incumbent, Republican President Mike Gartner. Though Benton is southern and white, his character is easily translated into the appeal of Obama during his 2008 campaign. Gartner on the other hand bears an amazing character likeness in appearance and style to a combination of G. W. Bush and John McCain. The story ends when the crisis with China that has consumed Benton's entire first year in office is tragically over with President Benton addressing a joint session of Congress on November 7, 2033.
As my first general comment, I can say this fiction enforces my pessimism about the viability of any government of a large and diverse country or region or union. Furthermore, I sense from a general reading of history that whoever gains political or military power, and likely that includes financial or industrial power, also gains at the same time a pig-headed stupidity in using that power. In the Americas it was evident in the European destruction of then existing indiginous societies in the post-Columbus world. The native leaderships had their own examples of the trait as well. It showed up in the revolutionary war on both sides. It appeared in the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson rift that led to the originally unintended two party system. It was particularly evident in the first military conduct of the American Civil War by General McLellan and his Army of the Potomac.
Ultimatum's Senator Benton mirrors Obama's campaign in many ways. He sets out and hammers away at a simple campaign package he calls New Foundation, stressing Health, Education, Relocation, Jobs. It works. As he begins work in the transition period to his inauguration and preparing for the legislative program and cabinet appointments, the incumbent Gartner, in a secret meeting, discloses to him privately that the global warming crisis is many times worse and much more imminent than anyone else knows. At the same time he tells Benton of secret bilateral negotiations for carbon reductions with the Chinese regime, then the largest offenders against the third set of Kyoto guidelines then in effect. The result is that Benton's publicly known program is effectively scuttled. He decides to keep the news secret and proceeds with the secret China negotiations. Honest Joe Benton has to waffle, prevaricate, rationalize and use all his political wiles to persuade his former Congressional mates to pass his program and go ever more trillions into debt, while dealing with the carbon reduction crisis as a daily distraction. The U.S. presidency is an impossible job. Though I have followed politics generally all my adult years, I still don't understand why so many people seek to take it on.
What I find most frightening is the sense that the author is really giving us a critique of the current Obama administration. In 2009 the U.S. is now getting ever more deeply embroiled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the story at page 85 the author relates a fundamentalist coup in Pakistan in 2013 with a nuclear war between India and Pakistan a real possibility. That would be the first year of Obams's second term assuming he is re-elected. Furthermore, according to the book the U.S. has by 2032 been fighting an insurgent war in Honduras to the south for a decade or so, and the threat of getting involved there is in the news as I write this issue. At the same time China is alreading having internal problems and is apparently using harsh measures to put down sectarian violence in a western Chinese province. All the book's scenarios are already in place. The U.S. debt to China, the nuclear proliferation, the melting ice caps and rising water levels, the desertification of California and the American South--they are already in evidence.
Whether or not one believes human carbon emissions are alone responsible for global warming in our post-industrial global economy, today government and industry are more intent on exploiting the riches made available in the Arctic than they are in reducing the effects of that exploitation. If the current recession turns into a global depression, perhaps populations will reduce the demands for the easy life with no thought of tomorrow that western consumerism provides.
In this first novel, the personal and family story is not exceptional. But if you are a political junkie like me, you will find the book fascinating. It's a good read.
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