- Sinclair, Upton.
Dragon's Teeth. Vol. 1.
Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, [1942] 2001.
ISBN 1-931313-03-2.
-
Between 1940 and 1953, Upton Sinclair published a massive
narrative of current events, spanning eleven lengthy
novels, in which real-world events between 1913 and 1949
were seen through the eyes of Lanny Budd, scion of a U.S.
munitions manufacturer family become art dealer and playboy
husband of an heiress whose fortune dwarfs his own. His extended
family and contacts in the art and business worlds provide
a window into the disasters and convulsive changes which beset
Europe and America in two world wars and the period between
them and afterward.
These books were huge bestsellers in their time, and this one won the
Pulitzer Prize, but today they are largely forgotten. Simon
Publications have made them available in facsimile reprint editions,
with each original novel published in two volumes of approximately 300
pages each. This is the third novel in the saga, covering the years
1929–1934; this volume, comprising the first three books of the
novel, begins shortly after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and ends
with the Nazi consolidation of power in Germany after the Reichstag
fire in 1933.
It's easy to understand both why these books were such a popular and
critical success at the time and why they have since been largely
forgotten. In each book, we see events of a few years before the
publication date from the perspective of socialites and people in a
position of power (in this book Lanny Budd meets “Adi”
Hitler and gets to see both his attraction and irrationality
first-hand), but necessarily the story is written without the
perspective of knowing how it's going to come out, which makes it
“current events fiction”, not historical fiction in the
usual sense. Necessarily, that means it's going to be dated not long
after the books scroll off the bestseller list. Also, the viewpoint
characters are mostly rather dissipated and shallow idlers, wealthy
dabblers in “pink” or “red” politics, who,
with hindsight, seem not so dissimilar to the feckless politicians in
France and Britain who did nothing as Europe drifted toward another
sanguinary catastrophe.
Still, I enjoyed this book. You get the sense that this is how the
epoch felt to the upper-class people who lived through
it, and it was written so shortly after the events it chronicles
that it avoids the simplifications that retrospection engenders.
I will certainly read the second half of this reprint, which currently
sits on my bookshelf, but I doubt if I'll read any of the others in
the epic.
November 2007 