Palace Council by Stephen L Carter – Review
Conspiracy to Control the President Travels Far but Doesn’t Enthrall
In 1952, 20 powerful white and black men gather to initiate a plot. Thirty months later, the body of one of the attendees is stumbled upon by upcoming writer Eddie Wesley. Frightened, Eddie flees, disturbed by the murder and the upside-down cross of St Peter that Philmont Castle was clasping.
Eddie’s curiosity pulls him into the deadly intrigue of the plotters – known as the Palace Council. When his pregnant sister, Junie, disappears, rumoured to have joined an underground terrorist cell, Eddie discovers links between her and the Council.
JFK, J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon
The reader joins Eddie on a two-decade search for Junie that takes in New York, Washington, London, Hong Kong, the Vietnam War, and meetings with Joseph Kennedy, JFK, J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. His quest is one of the novel’s two strands, the other being the conspiracy – but this is so oblique that most readers will give up trying to untangle it.
People who are dead turn up alive, characters who admit to having had affairs are lying. Clues are wrapped in coded references to Paradise Lost or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. If the novel’s jacket didn’t reveal that a wealthy group were trying to control the President (no big surprise there, surely), the reader would barely get a sniff of it until four-fifths of the way through the story.
Harlem Mob or the CIA?
One character says to Eddie, ‘You must be wondering what’s going on?’ To which most readers will nod vigorously.
Instead of hooking the reader, the narrative teases with an abundance of misdirection. Is Junie alive? Did she have an affair with Phil Castle? Or the uptight Benjamin Mellor? Is the deadly George Collier working for the Harlem mob? Or the CIA? Or the military? Or the Palace Council?
Beaten and Tortured
So it’s easier to focus on Eddie’s obsession with finding his sister. But even this side of the novel has little emotional pull. Junie studiously avoids Eddie for years and he blunders on looking for her, crossing the globe, getting beaten and tortured but still determined.
He’s a successful novelist, Kennedy speechwriter and catch for the high-born Harlem girls, but Eddie is also something of a po-faced plodder and strangely unsympathetic.
Lusting for the Woman He Lost
The dialogue he is given is prissy and annoying. When a gun is pointed at him he says, ‘You may safely dispense with these precautions.’ On another occasion he chimes, ‘You believe me to be a liar?’ Is it any wonder people punch him?
His devotion to his muse means he has missed the chance to marry the love of his life, Aurelia, who instead weds super-wealthy Kevin Garland (who just happens to be a member of the Palace Council). So not only does he seek the sister who avoids him but he spends most of the book lusting for the woman he let through his fingers.
Emperor of Ocean Park
At every stage, all the novel’s participants know every detail of Eddie’s secret investigations, from the influential matrons of Harlem society to the FBI to Eddie’s old school friends. Part of the problem is that because he is as utterly clueless as the reader about what’s going on he makes for a dull hero.
This is Stephen L Carter’s third novel after The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White. He is an academic turned successful fiction writer, and certainly his first novel was a well-plotted and acclaimed bestseller.
Law Professor
Because he is a law professor at Yale, some critics have sneered that his writing is lawyerly. That is unfair. His prose is lively and he is a creative conveyor of atmosphere and character at times.
The problem with Palace Council is that its historical backdrop, which clearly fascinates Carter, often fails to engage (Richard Nixon is certainly unconvincing), while it substitutes mangled plot machinations for emotionally compelling characters.
- Palace Council by Stephen L Carter ISBN 978-0-099-52702-2. Published in the UK by Vintage Books
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