Until about three quarters of the way through [Captains and the Kings] I more or less knew what I should be writing about. Now I am not so sure. It seemed to be one of those capacious dramatic tales of the American dollar dream in the tradition of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane. 'Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through the dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850's and he was a penniless immigrant, an orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister.' And he does, although the brother turns out to be a homosexual concert tenor and the sister a nun. Joseph's childhood humiliation makes him bitter and his bitterness makes him cruelly determined. His mania to reach the top devours him and all who cross his path, excepting his mistress. With his ruthless disregard for other people which is always necessary in accumulating great wealth, he does grow vastly rich, from oil and newspapers, gunrunning and brothels, and he grows very brutal in his use of that frightening political power which will obviously accompany it. Private riches on this lurid scale can and must buy everything which is of this every-day world, including Washington. This is the ultimate trophy Armagh covets for his son. The Presidency of a country which once spat upon him…. The story is rich in incident and character, complex in structure, and written with a strong narrative urgency which carries one forward without wasting breath. If the above outline should appear off-putting I ask you to ignore it because this is a solid and awesome book, worth anybody's time….

Captains and the Kings should become known as an addition to epic American literature—it has all the qualifications, muscularity above all—but its intentions go far beyond this and only become truly apparent towards the end. And it has unnerved me. Frightened me, I could say. This is a persuasive realist novel which draws you in and makes you believe in its fiction. When towards the end it moves, we are assured, into the region of fact that belief carries on through, and what it has to say is disturbing. When was the last time you read a novel which explicitly tries to save the world? (p. 105)

As Joseph Armagh's riches increase he moves in more and more powerful circles. He becomes a member of the Scardo Society, an alliance in the USA of intellectuals and rich capitalists who between them plan to run the system for their own benefit. This is scarcely the top, however. Not even the President is that. Right at the very top on this planet of ours is The Committee for Foreign Studies, a kind of super-sophisticated mafia group of the most powerful world bankers based in Europe and their biggest customers. It is they who control the global purse strings, who can make or break a President (Rory Armagh is ditched in favour of Woodrow Wilson), because the world fiscal system has reduced nations and governments to the status of pawns in the hands of international financiers. We all know that we live in a world of self-effacing intrigue, spying and conspiracy, official secrets and back-room deals, the grey faceless men controlling our destinies, popular participation in the process merely an illusion. But previously this conspiracy had been presented in involuntary abstract terms. Now it is revealed in concrete terms, in the conscious will at the very top of the pyramid. Its aficionados are beyond questions like the East-West conflict. It is all the same to them. Money is totally amoral, that is its beauty and its danger…. But the human species has an instinctive long-term awareness of what is best for it and a courageous minority rebels. The young, of course. Only they still have enough freedom of mind left to see what is wrong and the courage to express their distrust or contempt. It is no coincidence that those who attack or drop out of the system are harassed mercilessly by the majority whose minds—even the old lady next door—are blinded by the greed born of seductive material promises from above. It is no coincidence that the industrial political power blocks pay out huge sums to smaller governments to evict hippies, to develop the 'underdeveloped nations' more inescapably into the system (all the talk about giving the Third World enough to eat conceals a less attractive motive: the maxim that in this world you never get something for nothing holds good even here), to stamp out psychedelic drugs but not heroin which is very profitable and kills people's minds whereas the psychedelics do alter the consciousness and so frequently expose the fraud simply by altering one's point of observation and increasing its sensitivity (in consequence, as far as they are concerned. Timothy Leary is a far more dangerous man than, say, Eldridge Cleaver who is merely competing for power, hence Leary must be tracked down in Afghanistan then confined). By chance a book I reviewed two months ago, Enzensberger's Smut, drew very similar parallels between capitalism (not opposed to Communism), power and dirt. Humans have been made into dirt in their own world and are manipulated by financier despots. Humans are conditioned in their needs by heavy advertising and propaganda because conformity facilitates trade and profits. The entire system will probably collapse from its own cancerous gluttony, which is one of the few things the Committee did not bank on, but not before widespread misery has been created. We might mention the population explosion. It is patently vital for the future of the people that this be drastically reduced. Unfortunately, however, the system demands that it increase and so it does because the system has the power. The only people with nothing to lose meantime are the bankers because they deal in the central illusion only. Money. Which is ultimately nothing at all. They have no responsibility, they only collect and about that they are ruthless. No corpses can ever be laid at their door. As [Captains and the Kings] illustrates, when you pursue wealth to its limits your mind divorces itself from all humanity. In the world of pure finance, people and what happens to them never have to enter your calculations at all. (pp. 105-06)