One of the reasons for the novel’s preeminence as the literary form superbly fitted to describe and interpret life is the space it gives the writer to erect his structure, to illumine the nature of an individual, to characterize a people, to describe both human units in relation to the world. With his thousands of words the novelist can impart the shape he wants to the elements which will make his own vision of life meaningful to his reader. There is no better example of this characteristic of the novel than these works which use its freedom to treat that increasingly complex phenomenon of human activity--politics in its broadest sense. And, assuming the artist’s privilege, he often makes his work a personal thing, producing not only a work of art but a political instrument as well. chapter three The Novelist as Political Historian If Art imitates Nature, the political novel imitates History. In almost all these novels the starting point is a series of actual happenings. Filtered through the artist’s consciousness, they sometimes emerge in curious forms. But unless they are spun wholly from moonshine, like Crawford’s _An American Politician_, they usually bear some clearly discernible relation to the events of real life. Here again, the variety is great. Koestler’s _The Age of Longing_ (1951) is set in Europe of the future. In his words, “it merely carries the present one step further in time--to the middle nineteen-fifties.” An apprehensive continent, listening with one ear for the mushrooming of atomic bombs, anxiously watches the United States and Russia, feeling that its fate may be decided at any moment by a single move of either of the giants. Although the time is the future, the running account of these opponents’ moves which accompanies the story is based upon Koestler’s interpretation of recent patterns in international affairs. Perhaps he is too gloomy, but this is the pattern he sees: Russia trumpets alarms at what it claims is aggression of a “Rabbit State”; an international crisis occurs and the people clutch their Geiger counters and anti-radioactivity umbrellas; the crisis is averted and tension relaxes; the Rabbit State is absorbed by Russia as the United States sends a printed protest form. At the other end of the scale is the roman à clef, represented by novels such as Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_, in which the characters seem to be fictional counterparts of real people. The conventional disclaimer, “any resemblance to actual people ...,” is usually present, but the likeness is often too close to be explained by chance. A close parallel to the events in Gallico’s book is provided by the experiences of Robert Voegler and William Oatis. The ordeals of these two Americans were not related, but to fictionalize and interconnect them is a logical procedure for the writer building his novel around the subject