Charles McCarry’s 1995 novel “Shelley’s Heart” has a new relevance

Reading it today, one might wonder: Was McCarry disturbingly prescient about 9/11, the Middle East, the recent national election, the underappreciated importance of the Supreme Court—and much else? Or could his book actually have provided ideas, even a blueprint, for those responsible for the political upheavals of recent years? If so, then it seems that history—that joker!—has reversed many of the novel’s left-right dichotomies.

Set in the 1990s, Shelley’s Heart begins on a snowy day at the funeral of the Chief Justice of the United States. Just as the service is about to begin at Washington National Cathedral, wealthy businessman Franklin Mallory, who has just lost his election to become president again after a four-year hiatus, stops the newly re-elected Bedford Forrest Lockwood and secretly hands him a note. It reads: “I need to speak to you urgently and alone, long before you take the oath of office as President tomorrow, to make you aware of documentary evidence of voter fraud in California, Michigan and New York that calls into question your right to hold office.”

With the help of a far-right billionaire in the technology and communications industry, Mallory has discovered that a former intelligence officer named Horace Hubbard and his girlfriend, a computer whiz, have managed to get just enough votes – a surprisingly small number – to give his liberal opponent the victory. Only Horace’s half-brother Julian Hubbard, who is Lockwood’s chief of staff, knows about this chicanery. However, Lockwood refuses to believe Mallory’s statements, decides to go ahead with the inauguration, and vows to fight these and some even more damaging allegations.

The next day, on the morning of the inauguration, a gunman who had been hiding in a snowbank suddenly appears. He fires a dozen bullets in a row, apparently in an attempt to kill Mallory, and then miraculously escapes. But was Mallory the real target?

All of this happens in the first 49 pages of this 500-plus page novel, which quickly becomes extraordinarily exciting and complicated. In short, dialogue-rich chapters, the action shifts from Capitol Hill to the Kalorama Triangle to Rock Creek Park and, at one point, even to Bolivia.

For the Democrats, Mallory was “their worst nightmare come true when he was first elected.” But unlike the most prominent Republican of our time, Mallory is always polite and eloquent, values ​​his privacy, and spends hours every day reading serious writers like Macaulay and Goethe. Since the death of his beloved wife, he has remained loyal to his companion and adviser, Susan Grant. In short, McCarry portrays Mallory as a sophisticated, even cosmopolitan intellectual, a conservative who truly believes in democracy and the good of the nation. How old-fashioned!

At the same time, the tall, outspoken Lockwood is quite similar to his hero Abraham Lincoln. But moral rectitude may not be enough for him to remain president. To thwart Mallory’s plans, the scheming Julian turns to the novel’s third main character: Archimedes Hammett, a puritanical Yale law professor who has a morbid fear of being touched and infected by a virus. He is also a left-wing fanatic on a crusade – and a very dangerous one at that. “Hammett wanted to change the world from a young age, and he always knew that this could only be done gradually and according to a systematic plan.” So over the years he has quietly placed his students and followers in positions of power in government, the media and, above all, the judiciary. One character notes: “Extremists … have always viewed control of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in general as the key to political action, since the Court’s rulings are not subject to democratic constraints.”

Even more disturbing, Hammett views the Supreme Court itself “as a mechanism to overthrow the elected government of the United States and assume absolute power for 25 years.” His ultimate dream is to transform American society into a vaguely socialist utopia, albeit under his own steady leadership. In almost every way, Hammett recalls Theodor Adorno’s definition of the authoritarian personality: “a man who, under the pretext of upholding traditional American values ​​and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” In his own clandestine, decades-long political ambitions, Hammett is aided by his fellow members of the top-secret Shelley Society, about whom I will say no more.

During his lifetime, McCarry – a former CIA agent and longtime Washingtonian who died in 2019 at age 88 – was widely admired for his beautifully written spy thrillers featuring Paul Christopher and several generations of the Christopher-Hubbard family. Among them is Paul’s mysterious daughter Zarah, who appears in “Shelley’s Heart” and whom Hammett instinctively fears. But as we are frequently reminded, the Christopher dynasty of spies is unlucky, regularly suffering “disappearances, lost loved ones, death at the hands of fools, betrayal by friends, hopeless desire – every kind of psychic imprisonment the 20th century offers.”

Like his English colleague John le Carré, McCarry’s books revisit the same characters over and over again, revealing new facets of past events or even turning what we thought we knew on its head. What the dogged, Columbo-like private detective John LS McGraw, one of the supporting heroes of “Shelley’s Heart,” says about rereading applies equally to intelligence operations: “You rarely understood everything the first time you looked at something – no matter how systematic you thought you were. It was impossible to grasp every detail unless you kept going back and looking at the story again, and then again, and again.”

In this respect, Shelley’s Heart repeatedly draws on events chronicled in The Better Angels (1979), set during Lockwood’s first term in office. In that book, Ibn Awad, an aging, manic-depressive Middle Eastern sheikh, finances the construction of two atomic bombs to be detonated in Tel Aviv and New York by a terrorist group called the Eye of Gaza. Horace Hubbard eventually deals with the situation, but the question remains: Did President Lockwood authorize Ibn Awad’s assassination, despite publicly claiming the opposite? And what of the various unintended consequences? Vengeance is a dominant theme in McCarry’s novels, beginning with his masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination, The Tears of Autumn (1974).

While McCarry’s early novels sometimes seem to idealize privilege, wealth, and family, Shelley’s Heart does not. To these smug whiffenpoofs, as one character disdainfully calls them, even President Lockwood is simply “a man from the lower classes whom they put in power so that he could act on the basis of their wisdom.” As such, he is expendable. Fittingly, then, it is the shabby, Bible-quoting Speaker of the House, an alcoholic womanizer now dying of cirrhosis of the liver, who becomes the shrewd and implacable nemesis of all these “rich boys.”

In addition to the clean, slightly ironic style of his exposition and description, McCarry could also render seemingly every kind of spoken English, from prissy correctness to vulgar sexism. But above all, his book never lets us down with the sense of looming threat, especially towards Zarah. When a little girl speaks to the dead through a Ouija board, it deeply disturbs Hammett, but that seems hardly less odd than that two lesbian lawyers, members of the Womonkind’s Coalition, serve him, prepare his special dishes, and carry out his enigmatic wishes. As is the case today, even abortion and such things as IVF clinics play an important role in the novel. Yet the obvious questions always lurk in the background: When will the assassin strike again? Who will be the target? And is there a connection to the political cat-and-mouse games taking place on Capitol Hill?

Ultimately, Shelley’s Heart makes a strong case for the primacy of simple humanity and decency over ideology, for intelligence over privilege, and above all for the realization that nothing in politics is final.