Surrealpolitik: For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite

Quick Summary

Early terrorism novel, but really a love story of sorts. Maimie is an impossibly alluring and impossibly childlike young woman who exists only to be loved and admired and has no capacity for real feelings for anybody else. All she wants is for men to adore her. She is ready to throw any woman under the bus, and most men, without ever being mean about it. She's honest about everything and everyone loves her. She ends up marrying Sydney Chevenix, a brilliant chemist who has invented a totally silent explosive. He is the most noble character in the book, sacrificing everything with insane selflessness for Maimie's sake; but he is also a racist in a way that betrays no awareness of the fact on the part of the author. The book also displays constant misogyny and the men are almost uniformly openly condescending and insulting towards the women, and, like Sydney's racism, this is not portrayed as any kind of character flaw. For my purposes, the interesting thing is the terrorists. They are named characters, and led by Vera Trotsky. They are referred to sometimes as nihilists and sometimes as communists, and Allen seems to make no distinction and have no awareness of what either term means. To him they both mean "people who are bent on blowing things up." Allen allows them integrity and they're not unlikeable. The only people they manage to injure in the course of the novel are each other. They are effectively controlled, or so they believe, by a force they call The Unconscious, which is rather like the surrealists' conception of objective chance. It's random chance, good luck, but they attribute it to a design, an intelligence. But this is specifically not "Providence" -- it's the Unconscious. Opposed to Providence, so it contains a kind of menace, and it seems to operate only for terrorists. So they're kind of mystical. It's a pretty good page turner despite ridiculous one-dimensional unrealistic characters and a strong sensation that the author doesn't understand anything about anything.

Last updated: April 8, 2022