Satire

After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

Satire is more than just biting animosity or moral denunciation, though in those shapes it has made its greatest contribution to world literature – from Aristophanes and Juvenal to the first Samuel Butler and Swift. The convention only works in relatively permissive societies. During the worst excesses of censorship in the Cold War, the authorities were seldom worried by satires cleverly concealed as fables or dystopian extravaganzas. Let the cognoscenti exchange winks, their rulers knew that the mob was not interested and the state hardly threatened. The censors themselves may well have enjoyed the ingenuity of their indignant critics – so Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Andrey Voznesensky prospered without having to defect to the West. Meanwhile, satire turned into cabaret in our part of the world.