Meeting Below the Summit
ARGUS, M. K.
Meeting Below the Summit The Looking-Glass Conference. By Godfrey Blunden. Vanguard. 258 pp. $3.75. THIS hilarious book by Godfrey Blunden, author of the poignant novel A Room on the Route, is...
...Foggbottom, Asp, Lion...
...He knows exactly what goes on around a negotiating table, or in the august skulls of the foreign secretaries, or in the somewhat less august but no less formidable skulls of the undersecretaries, ambassadors, security officers, society matrons, and a few plain, innocent mortals caught inadvertently in the net of international coexistence...
...The conference is being held in the lovely Alpine city of Colmo, which, I strongly suspect, is Geneva, and is dealing with the fate of a Far Eastern country named Khaos, which, I also suspect, is Indo-China...
...I suspect that Messrs...
...These are the people who make newspaper headlines, who direct the destinies of nations, who utter sanctimonious banalities with the air of saviors of mankind, who create at each new conference a new mess that makes one long for the good old mess that existed before the conference...
...It's a lampoon, of course, an extravaganza, but it's extremely funny...
...He uses a huge canvas, and he paints with broad strokes...
...All good satires contain the portentous elements of doom...
...The delegations (numerous and vociferous) of their respective countries are headed by Joseph Fogg-bottom, Secretary of State, U.S.A...
...THIS hilarious book by Godfrey Blunden, author of the poignant novel A Room on the Route, is about a high-level five-power conference, with American, British, French, Soviet and Red Chinese bigwigs and smallwigs participating...
...Godfrey Blunden does not try to be subtle...
...and Comrade J'o Wow...
...Albion Asp, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, U.K...
...Nor will vou have any difficulty in recognizing all the other grotesque characters who move in and out of the paces of this willy, biting satire Reviewed by M. K. Argus Author, "Moscow-on-the-Hudson," "A Rogue with Ease'* on the incongruous contemporary international scene...
...Golikov and Wow are the prototypes of hut never mind that...
...If you read the book, as you should, you will recognize them at once...
...Blunden knows whereof he writes: a conference of five powers to decide the fate of a sixth, held against a background of petty jealousies and silly ambitions, intrigues, counter-intrigues and sheer idiocy...
...M. Pierre Lion, Minister of Foreign Affairs of France...
...Prime Minister of the Dominant People's Republic of China...
...The Looking-Glass Conference is a hilarious book, but it left me saddened—the highest tribute one ran a satire...
...Comrade Yefin Golikov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR...
...Unfortunate Khaos has been torn by civil strife and split into two parts, one Communist, the other non-Communist—Inevitable Khaos and Incredible Khaos...
...Yet, when you put the book down, you have the feeling that the author's portraits are disturbingly life-size...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 3
