[O'Connor was an Irish short story writer and critic. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of Politics and the Novel.]

The title of Irving Howe's book of essays [Politics and the Novel] seems to me a great pity. It is a pity from the point of view of the Common Reader like myself who does not want to read another word on the subject of Malraux, Koestler and George Orwell, and is liable to overlook the fact that the book also deals with Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Turgenev and Henry James, and deals with them in a way that the lover of the novel is bound to appreciate.

It is also a pity from Mr. Howe's point of view, for it is clear that, having invented the category of the political novel, he then went home and worried about whether there was any such thing; and in the middle of an admirable piece of literary exposition will suddenly begin to worry again, and let the baby fall, and have to send for the doctor. If there is such a thing as a political novel I should have thought it might be found among the half dozen wonderful stories that Trollope wrote about the English democratic system of government. Mr. Howe apparently disagrees.

"The greatest of all political novels," he tells us, is The Possessed, and this "was written with the explicit purpose of excommunicating all beliefs that find salvation anywhere but in the Christian God," a queer purpose for a political novel! He goes on to say that in this book. Dostoevsky "verged on the heresy—I am not enough of a theologian to identify it—that every man is or can be Christ." I am not much of a theologian either, so I read on to discover that "it is precisely as caricature—what I have called buffoonery—that the book must be read."

So, The Possessed is a political novel, but it has a theological theme, and is to be read as buffoonery! I know even less about politics than I do about theology, but I do know when a baby has had a bad fall, and this one is in danger of concussion. Mr. Howe, too, seems to feel compunction, for he adds that Dostoevsky was "the greatest of all ideological novelists." "Politics," you see, means theology, ideology, philosophy, morality; occasionally it is even extended to mean politics, though not the democratic politics of Trollope. Usually it means revolutionary politics, so that the book ends with Orwell, not Snow.

Once the reader learns to accept the contradiction between Mr. Howe, the literary critic, and Mr. Howe, the critic of ideas, he finds himself free to enjoy a really first-rate intelligence. He will merely blink mildly when Mr. Howe, having given a first-class demonstration of Stendhal's character drawing, goes on to say that the conception of character is "the heritage of nineteenth century romanticism"; and that "the whole idea of the self as something precious and inviolable is a cultural idea, and, as we understand it, a product of the liberal era." (Which liberal era?)

As a literary critic, he is excellent in dealing with Malraux, of whose merits he seems to have some doubts; Silone, whom he appears to love and Koestler, whom he appears to dislike; but with Orwell, the political critic again comes on top, and he fails to convince me either of Orwell's talent or sincerity. He quotes Orwell, writing shortly before his death, to say "My novel 1984 is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party."

As an apolitical man, I cannot help wondering if this is altogether candid, because as literary critic of a London Conservative newspaper, I did receive, along with my review copy of 1984, a circular letter estimating the number of votes it was believed the book would cost the Labour party at the next General Election. Is that English? Is that cricket? Is that fair play?