Victor in Trouble. Alex Finley. Athens, Greece: Smiling Hippo Press, 2022.
Satire is tough to pull off without intimate knowledge of a topic and a wry sense of humor that captures a reader’s attention, making them feel like the inner circle for an inside joke. Satire about the U.S. federal government is prolific, likely because the federal government is an easy target for its employees to poke fun at it. It is almost cathartic to talk about the shared trauma of bureaucracy between coworkers and fellow federal sufferers. Finding a way to share these experiences and inside jokes with outsiders is trickier though. There is a minefield of devoted loyalties, fragile feelings, and legitimate regulations concerning classification that must be accounted for by any author attempting to satirize Uncle Sam’s bizarre machinations. Luckily for those of us who work in the world of defense and diplomatic policy, Alex Finley exists. Even more fortunately, in these trying times where we shake our heads in disbelief over stories on cable news, Alex Finley’s Victor in Trouble exists. The third in her Victor Caro series, Victor in Trouble is the satirical delight that we all need.
Written in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Finley has given her lead protagonists, the Caro family, the ultimate pre-retirement tour: a three-year assignment to Rome. Victor and Vanessa Caro, who embody a modern partnership between a foreign intelligence officer and a federal investigator, are exactly as sharp witted and sarcastic as you hope they will be. Their coworkers at the CYA (yes, you read that correctly) and the FBI are the perfect amalgamation of everyone’s coworkers. Their sarcastic and perpetually online teenage offspring, Oliver, is every high school kid raised in the shifting life of foreign service families. But only Finley’s characters could find themselves embroiled in a national security nightmare, coming on the heels of a presidential election that is covered with the hallmarks of Russian interference, a conflict in Ukraine, a massive and coordinated internet disinformation campaign, and members of congress doing…well…everything that actual congressional leaders have been in the news for recently. Finley’s satire is built on a highly accurate skeleton of reality, a trend she began in her previous works. This makes her writing immediately accessible to even readers outside of the foreign service sphere. You do not have to be part of the Caro family’s world to immediately connect with Finley’s writing.
Finley’s antagonists are as delightful as her protagonists but with so many more blissfully duplicitous twists. Her Russian oligarchs are truly malevolent, partying on comically over-the-top yachts. Her Russian spy is a honeypot worthy of Ian Fleming. Her vociferous Facts News anchor, Kip Lawson, is suitable for the most prime of primetime slots on cable news. Her dungeon of Russian internet trolls is so on-point that you will catch yourself checking your social media trending menus to see if #KidneyIceCream or people lighting their flatulence on fire for the President has genuinely become a thing in the last hour. Don’t worry. It has not. What makes Finley’s universe of Russian bad guys so believable is her intimate knowledge of national policy, strategy, government bureaucracy, and human idiosyncrasies.
Finley’s work is part of a long and glorious tradition of satire in the world of military and foreign affairs. Her books are a welcome mental break for modern audiences, but the wellspring of military and diplomatic satire was already deep. For autocratic societies, where censorship is a defining characteristic, satirists walk fine lines to say quiet thoughts out loud. This flirtation with disaster is crucial to sharing the realities of authoritarian regimes and garnering support for everything from state corruption to genocide.[1] Even the Soviet Union of the 1920s had the underground paper, Krokodil, and a thriving underground literature world poking fun at life under Soviet rule. Josef Stalin, a man notorious for murdering all dissenters, defended the 1926 satirical play, The Day of the Turbins, and was rumored to read anti-bureaucratic satires to his young sons.[2] For democratic societies with a free press, satire has provided an avenue to address challenging topics and build a sense of community through shared humor. Floods of satirical music, art, and literature have emerged in the wake of national and global events, particularly wars. Rudyard Kipling’s cheeky short story, The Janeites, examined the absurdity of the First World War through the ritual of British soldiers gathering to discuss the literary world of Jane Austen, a talented satirist herself, in the misery of the trenches.[3] With the 1963 stage debut of Oh, What a Lovely War, critics and audiences realized the play’s messages went far beyond the archetypal British WWI hero. On stage, and later in film and television, it used popular songs, vaudevillian tropes, and choreographed dance to excavate audience memories and dissect a bittersweet historical period. Like all great satire, Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War reached into the historic wealth of actual songs, photographs, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and official statistics from the war to present her distinctly anti-war sentiments.[4]
Across the Atlantic, in America, satirical works like Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel, Catch-22, and Richard Hooker’s iconic 1968 fiction, M*A*S*H, used the authors’ personal experience to challenge the American view of war’s inherent nobility. Heller and Hooker (the pen name for former military surgeon H. Richard Hornberger) had both served in times of war, living through the sources of their literary inspiration. Hooker’s work, which would be later adapted for film and the hit television series, laid bare the farcical nature of war and the irrationality of its warfighters. Both M*A*S*H the movie and the book took risks through the artful application of humor, even boldly probing the difficult realities of Black life in the post-segregation military through neurosurgeon and pro-footballer, Dr. Oliver Wendell Jones, known as “Spearchucker” to the members of 4077th.[5] Throughout the modern era, audiences have gobbled satires as a way to reflect on geopolitical events, from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in 1964 to David Michôd’s 2017 War Machine, a Netflix movie parodying Michael Hasting’s nonfiction account of Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.
Victor in Trouble joins this noble tradition of wry, witty fiction that diffuses tension and makes it acceptable to examine our own bureaucratic foibles. It is also an effective, if sneaky, tool for professional development. By including satirical literature and cinema into reading or viewing lists, military and foreign policy practitioners can diffuse the emotional fuel from fiery topics, reexamine challenging discussions from alternate points of view, and spark constructive and critical questions in new audiences. In the case of Finley’s work, the characters and events are instantly recognizable and feel like they were pulled from real life…because they were! Finley opens opportunities to talk about misinformation campaigns, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the insidious nature of divisive political rhetoric through an accessible book that is genuinely enjoyable. In the right hands, Victor in Trouble is more than just a D.C. Beltway inside joke. It is the kind of fun and engaging read we all need right now.
Nikki Dean is a seemingly perpetual graduate student with the University of Kansas Museum Studies program and is a recently retired U.S. Army Aviation officer. Her academic research focuses on art looting, illicit markets, curation, and collections management in war. She tweets into the void from @doctrinatrix_C2 and Instagrams randomly from @doctrinatrix. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the University of Kansas, U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Rome at Dusk, Rome, Italy 2016 (Tyrell Mayfield).
Notes:
[1] Leonard Freedman, “Wit as a Political Weapon: Satirists and Censors,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 87-112.
[2] Ibid, 89.
[3] “The Janeites by Rudyard Kipling,” Extended Reading, Jane Austen Blog, The Jane Austen Centre, accessed August 7, 2023, https://janeausten.co.uk/blogs/extended-reading/the-janeites-2
[4] Kevin M. Flanagan, “Displacements and Diversions: Oh! What a Lovely War and the Adaptation of Trauma,” South Atlantic Review 80, no. 3-4 (2015): 96-100.
[5] Austin Gorman, “’M*A*S*H: The Longest Yard’, and the Integrationist Imagination in the Postsegregation Era,” American Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 27-47.