'Phil': an allegory from an outlandish imagination
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
By George Saunders
Riverhead, 134 pp., paperback, $13
No matter where we align ourselves along the political spectrum, there can be little argument that we live in an increasingly grim era. War, ecological disaster, and cultural splits on everything from abortion to gay marriage and evolution have worn our national sense of humor down to the point where even our television news personalities -- those steady, smooth-faced optimists -- appear to have been afflicted with a highly contagious strain of hemorrhoids. In light of these events, the timing and panache of George Saunders's new novella, a parable called ''The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil," could not be more appropriate. If we must live in an age where everyone is aggrieved to some degree or other, the always clever Saunders seems to have realized that his only comic redoubt is to find comedy in a story concerning the most offensive things possible: fascism and genocide.
The primary players are the weak, mincing Inner Hornerites and the loutish, grandiose Outer Hornerites, the occupants of neighboring and eponymous countries. Vaguely humanoid, these characters are difficult to envision, but the reader will delight in their vivid inexplicability: ''[Cal] resembled a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it, if a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it had been stapled to a tuna fish can."
Moreover, one is so accustomed to parables being staged anthropomorphically, the creation is doubly fresh by comparison.
The trouble between these two nations begins simply, when an Inner Hornerite accidentally lets one of his appendages ( an ''octagonal shovel-like receptacle") slip from the almost barren land of Inner Horner over the border into Outer Horner. It is at this moment that the titular Phil appears -- an Outer Hornerite whose chief characteristic is his exposed brain -- barking an unhinged populist sermon along the lines of Huey Long, or perhaps, even less flatteringly, Hitler: ''I've been thinking about how God the Almighty gave us this beautiful sprawling land as a reward for how wonderful we are. We're big, we're energetic, we're generous. . . . Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a small crappy land? . . . It is not my place to start cross-examining God Almighty, asking why He gave them such a small crappy land, my place is to simply enjoy and protect the big bountiful land God Almighty gave us!"
This trumpet call pretty much seals the fates of the Inner Hornerites, and a series of increasingly cruel deprivations follows, starting with crushing taxation, progressing to imprisonment, and culminating in execution, which is called ''disassembling" in the parlance of the Inner and Outer Hornerites. (A minor aside: This bit of terminology unfortunately recalled to the mind of this reviewer ''Short Circuit," the Steve Guttenberg-Fisher Stevens vehicle about the sentient robot Number 5, whose greatest fear was to be ''disassembled." Granted, such an association probably casts greater aspersion on the reviewer than Mr. Saunders, but there it is.)
Saunders, whose prose is never stronger than when he adopts the humorous fatalism of the career dead-ender (see the classic ''Pastoralia"), proves more than up to the task of giving voice to an entire geopolitical region, from devious presidential advisers to doubting soldiers, funny-walking foreign neighbors, and, best of all, a marvelously self-important and obsequious media, ''squat little men with detachable megaphones growing out of their clavicles."
But what, specifically, is ''The Brief and Terrible Reign of Phil" a parable for? Is the predicament of the hemmed-in Inner Hornerites, for instance, meant to refer to Palestine, with the Outer Hornerites filling the role of Israel? Or elsewhere, for example, when the Inner Hornerites are packed into a holding pen called (in fine Orwellian fashion) the ''Peace-Encouraging Enclosure," is Saunders making a point about our own nation's military prison at Guantanamo Bay? Or is this a historical gesture toward the Japanese internment camps of World War II?
The reader will find it hard not to speculate about the many echoes of modern and historical conflict (from Iraq to the Cold War, take your pick), but the jumble of references reduces any one interpretation to an exercise in wishful thinking. From a certain point of view this could be seen as a failure of nerve on the part of the writer, a refusal to admit what he really believes and take a stand. On the other hand, the desire for such outright answers, and the writer's unwillingness to provide them, could be seen as the whole point. It might also be argued by the writer, especially one as madly inventive as Saunders, that the strictures of a specific parable would act to limit his imagination, and therefore the fun.
What pleasure the reader finds may depend on this issue. The book is a riff -- and a very amusing one, I hasten to add -- on any number of 20th-century monstrosities, not a straight metaphor on the chilling developments of our own time, international and domestic. Some press materials that have made reference to Orwell's ''Animal Farm" do the book no favors. In that book the lines between what the audience knew of actual human suffering in fascist Russia carried over a real pathos to the cruel lives and pitiful deaths of the farmyard animals. When one Inner Hornerite is ''disassembled," his odd parts scattered far across the world, there is only a mild tug of sadness; for better or worse, this act of destruction is resolutely fictional.
Owen King is the author of ''We're All in This Together," a novella and stories.See ''Bookings," Page D8, for information on a local appearance by George Saunders.
