The Oldest Confession
Encyclopedia
The Oldest Confession is a 1958 novel, the first of twenty-five by the American political novelist and satirist Richard Condon
. It was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts
. A tragicomedy
about the attempted theft of a masterpiece from a museum in Spain
, it engendered, along with other early works such as The Manchurian Candidate
, a relatively brief Condon cult. Superficially it is what today would be called a caper story
or caper novel, a subspecies of the crime novel—generally a light-hearted romp in which a gang of disparate characters bands together to pull off a substantial robbery from a seemingly impregnable site. The acknowledged master of this genre was the late Donald E. Westlake
.
In spite of adhering to most of the informal rules of this genre, however, which include alternating comedy with scenes of dramatic tension and suspense and always building towards a powerful and surprising climax, Condon ends up thumbing his nose at most of these conventions and, for the last third of the book, it is clearly out-and-out tragedy that he is writing rather than comedy or straight entertainment. By then it has become apparent that, throughout the book, he has been writing about the human condition
and its perils rather than merely regaling the reader with the story of an outrageous theft, no matter how ingenious its details.
With this initial novel, Condon clearly laid out the parameters for his next 24: a fast-moving, mostly tongue-in-cheek, semi-thriller narrative aimed at the general reader, peppered with occasional moments of grotesque horror and violence, all recounted by an omniscient narrator with a keen sense of irony and sardonicism, and always overlaid, to a greater or lesser degree, by Condon's very deeply felt attitudes about America, business, money, greed, ethics, and morality.
article, an imaginary book whose lines have all been created by Condon himself. The epitaph to this first novel, which appears on the title page of the first American hardback edition, reads in its entirety:
These, of course, are much the same words that Condon uses in speaking to A.H. Weiler of the New York Times as quoted just above.
James Bourne, an American in his middle 30s, is the protagonist and anti-hero
of the book. He is a superficially likable character, tall, physically powerful and intelligent. Bourne enunciates one of Condon's recurring themes: that all businessmen are, by their very nature, both immoral and criminal. Bourne is shown to have learned this by working as a young man in his father's insurance business for a number of years; he has been driven to the conclusion that all businessmen are, by definition, crooks and that it is no crime to steal from them. However, Bourne also believes that it is not a crime to steal from those who are actually friends of yours. The only truly honest people, he states throughout the book, are those who are avowedly criminal. But in spite of Bourne's brooding introversion and his apparently genuine love for his wife, he is a totally self-absorbed and totally amoral person, ready to destroy all those around him through callousness, obliviousness, and solipsism. In this he is the forerunner of a number of later Condon "heroes" in books to come, the most notable of whom is probably Captain Colin Huntington RN (ret.), the cashiered Royal Navy captain who is the monomaniacally self-centered protagonist of the 1972 novel Arigato, and who, in spite of his stylishness, elegance, and cultivation, is directly responsible by the end of the book for the deaths of scores of innocent people.
Bourne is far from appearing in every scene. The number of other characters, however, is relatively small. Like Bourne, who perceives himself as the world's greatest criminal genius, many of them are also superlatives in their own right:
And finally:
The dozens of great masterpieces that Condon had glimpsed hanging in the darkness of the Escorial became, in The Oldest Confession, paintings hanging in the main residence of Doña Blanca Conchita Hombria y Arias de Ochoa y Acebal, Marquesa de Vidal, Condesa de Ocho Pinas, Vizcondesa Ferri, Duquesa de Dos Cortes, a 29-year-old beauty who was married to an aged degenerate and becomes the wealthiest woman in Spain upon his death. The long-forgotten paintings are coveted by an American criminal named James Bourne, who lives in a hotel in Madrid and has stolen numerous other valuable paintings from across Spain. His method is simple, though arduous and dangerous: he replaces the original paintings with undetectable forgeries executed by Jean Marie Calvert, a Parisian artist who is the world's greatest copyist.
Painted in Paris, the reproductions are brought into Spain by Bourne's wife, an upper-class young American girl named Eve Lewis, who loves Bourne in spite of his criminality. In the first few dozen pages of the book Bourne successfully steals, with no twinges of remorse, three masterpieces from the castle of his supposed friend, the Duchess of Dos Cortes, and arranges for his wife to smuggle them to Paris for a highly profitable sale. When she arrives in Paris, however, she discovers that the mailing tube in which the paintings were being carried is now empty. The rest of the book is the narrative of their downhill path, as well as that of most of those people unlucky enough to have found themselves in their orbit.
Although Bourne has always fancied himself a master criminal, he is tracked by other criminals who are equally intelligent. The downhill path for all of the book's characters begins when Bourne is coerced into accepting a seemingly impossible task: to steal one of the world's most famous masterpieces, the Dos de Mayo, or Second of May or Charge of the Marmelukes, by Francisco de Goya, from its tightly guarded quarters in the national museum of Spain, the Prado. Adding to the difficulty of the task is the sheer size of the painting: it measures eight feet high by 11 feet wide.
By the last page of what begun as a light-hearted caper story, all of the principal characters, and some of the minor ones, are either dead, among the walking dead, or incarcerated for life. The very last words of the book are an apt summation: "His ruined face stared. She screamed. She screamed again. She could not stop screaming."
, a film starring Frank Sinatra
and Sophia Loren
being shot in Spain. As he writes in his memoir, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra, he was present at a scene being filmed in the ancient rectory of the Escorial, the massive palace and cathedral outside Madrid
. The enormous lights needed to film the scene
Back in New York, Condon began turning his initial concept into a screenplay—until his wife pointed out, correctly, that he was writing it in the past tense instead of the present, which is obligatory for screenplays, and that it should be turned into a novel. Condon followed her advice and the book was published to favorable reviews not long afterwards.
and Rita Hayworth
, and was dismissed by The New York Times as a "limp herring" of "the devastating first novel."
Charles Poore, however, writing two months earlier in the daily Times, contented himself with a long synopsis of the story, finding "...a murderous sort of zaniness to Mr. Condon's plot" and remarking that "With a technique that requires all surprises and revelations to be undermined by fresh surprises and revelations, Mr. Condon spins everyone deeper and deeper into the plot."
Time magazine, the leading mid-brow American weekly for most of the 20th century, did not review The Oldest Confession. Over the next 30 years, however, they mentioned it at least six times, always favorably, and frequently as containing superior qualities that Condon's later novels generally failed to meet:
Richard Condon
Richard Thomas Condon was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers...
. It was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts
Appleton-Century-Crofts
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., was a division of the Meredith Publishing Company. It is a result of the merger of Appleton-Century Company with F.S. Crofts Co. in 1948. Prior to that, The Century Company had merged with D...
. A tragicomedy
Tragicomedy
Tragicomedy is fictional work that blends aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature, from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy referred to a serious play with either a happy ending or enough jokes throughout the play to lighten the mood.-Classical...
about the attempted theft of a masterpiece from a museum in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, it engendered, along with other early works such as The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate , by Richard Condon, is a political thriller novel about the son of a prominent US political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for the Communist Party....
, a relatively brief Condon cult. Superficially it is what today would be called a caper story
Caper story
The caper story is a subgenre of crime fiction. The typical caper story involves one or more crimes perpetrated by the main characters in full view of the reader...
or caper novel, a subspecies of the crime novel—generally a light-hearted romp in which a gang of disparate characters bands together to pull off a substantial robbery from a seemingly impregnable site. The acknowledged master of this genre was the late Donald E. Westlake
Donald E. Westlake
Donald Edwin Westlake was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction or other genres...
.
In spite of adhering to most of the informal rules of this genre, however, which include alternating comedy with scenes of dramatic tension and suspense and always building towards a powerful and surprising climax, Condon ends up thumbing his nose at most of these conventions and, for the last third of the book, it is clearly out-and-out tragedy that he is writing rather than comedy or straight entertainment. By then it has become apparent that, throughout the book, he has been writing about the human condition
Human condition
The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc. — a search for purpose, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of...
and its perils rather than merely regaling the reader with the story of an outrageous theft, no matter how ingenious its details.
With this initial novel, Condon clearly laid out the parameters for his next 24: a fast-moving, mostly tongue-in-cheek, semi-thriller narrative aimed at the general reader, peppered with occasional moments of grotesque horror and violence, all recounted by an omniscient narrator with a keen sense of irony and sardonicism, and always overlaid, to a greater or lesser degree, by Condon's very deeply felt attitudes about America, business, money, greed, ethics, and morality.
The title
In the course of his books, Condon frequently quotes verses or phrases from a work called The Keener's Manual, in at least three instances deriving the title of that particular book from something in the manual. The manual is, however, as noted in greater detail in the Richard CondonRichard Condon
Richard Thomas Condon was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers...
article, an imaginary book whose lines have all been created by Condon himself. The epitaph to this first novel, which appears on the title page of the first American hardback edition, reads in its entirety:
The Oldest Confession
Is one of Need,
Half the need Love,
The other half Greed
These, of course, are much the same words that Condon uses in speaking to A.H. Weiler of the New York Times as quoted just above.
Characters
Like most of the characters in Condon's books, those in The Oldest Confession have little pretention to being true-to-life: they are, for the most part, colorfully drawn grotesques or funny hats. One of Condon's great talents, however, is imbuing even his most exaggerated characters with enough life-like or sympathetic features that their trials and often hideously unpleasant fates can be deeply poignant.James Bourne, an American in his middle 30s, is the protagonist and anti-hero
Anti-hero
In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
of the book. He is a superficially likable character, tall, physically powerful and intelligent. Bourne enunciates one of Condon's recurring themes: that all businessmen are, by their very nature, both immoral and criminal. Bourne is shown to have learned this by working as a young man in his father's insurance business for a number of years; he has been driven to the conclusion that all businessmen are, by definition, crooks and that it is no crime to steal from them. However, Bourne also believes that it is not a crime to steal from those who are actually friends of yours. The only truly honest people, he states throughout the book, are those who are avowedly criminal. But in spite of Bourne's brooding introversion and his apparently genuine love for his wife, he is a totally self-absorbed and totally amoral person, ready to destroy all those around him through callousness, obliviousness, and solipsism. In this he is the forerunner of a number of later Condon "heroes" in books to come, the most notable of whom is probably Captain Colin Huntington RN (ret.), the cashiered Royal Navy captain who is the monomaniacally self-centered protagonist of the 1972 novel Arigato, and who, in spite of his stylishness, elegance, and cultivation, is directly responsible by the end of the book for the deaths of scores of innocent people.
Bourne is far from appearing in every scene. The number of other characters, however, is relatively small. Like Bourne, who perceives himself as the world's greatest criminal genius, many of them are also superlatives in their own right:
- Bourne's wife, Eve Lewis, a young American who has come to Paris and, through a number of lovers, quickly learned a number of languages. After becoming Bourne's lover and criminal accomplice, she now travels with a large number of passports in various names.
- Jean Marie Calvert, the unequaled French copyist. He is a vital cog in Bourne's plan to steal the Dos de Mayo, but, just as success is at hand, suddenly panics at a crucial moment, thereby derailing the robbery and leading to his own ignominious end.
- His wife, Lalu, who is barely sketched in beyond: "Lalu looked like a nursery doll. Her voice was higher than a dog's whistle... The sounds she made were like a well filled with drunken canaries."
- The nonpareil Duchess of Dos Cortes and her lover:
- Cayetano Jiminez, the world's greatest matadorMatadorA torero or toureiro is a bullfighter and the main performer in bullfighting, practised in Spain, Colombia, Portugal, Mexico, France and various other countries influenced by Spanish culture. In Spanish, the word torero describes any of the performers who actively participate in the bullfight...
. - Homer Pickett, an absurd, compulsively talkative backwoods American congressman from downstate Illinois who is, improbably, the world's greatest authority on Spanish paintings.
- The congressman's drunken, and sexually frustrated, wife who sees life through a glass of absintheAbsintheAbsinthe is historically described as a distilled, highly alcoholic beverage. It is an anise-flavoured spirit derived from herbs, including the flowers and leaves of the herb Artemisia absinthium, commonly referred to as "grande wormwood", together with green anise and sweet fennel...
. - Lawyer Chern, a Swiss lawyer who makes a brief but important appearance before coming to a gruesome end at the hands of James Bourne, who locks him for what is intended to be a few days into a Parisian cellar and then, under the stress of other, more pressing, matters, forgets about him.
- Various minor characters such as English gangsters, Spanish customs officials and lawyers, and employees of Bourne's hotel.
And finally:
- Dr. Victoriano Muñoz, Marqués de Villabra, a wealthy, half-mad Spanish nobleman obsessed by injustices supposedly done to his family a hundred years earlier by the painter Francisco de Goya. A cartoon character drawn almost utterly without plausibility, he is obsessive about his mustache, its looks and its long nightly maintenance, and carries a topaz cat named Montes draped about him as a permanent part of his persona. In spite of his substantial wealth, Muñoz feels that he lives in a state of impoverishment caused by Goya and that he must take revenge against the great, but long-dead painter. Apparently only an minor and inconsequential figure in the opening chapters of the book, he is, in fact, both the villain of the novel and, in some ways, its most important character, for it is he who, unbeknownst to Bourne and the others, first sets the plot in motion and then intrudes, at various moments, to keep it going in ways that are generally surprising to the reader. In doing so, he causes, either wittingly or not, the deaths of a number of the other characters, but it still comes as something of a shock when he himself is suddenly beaten to death in his own luxurious quarters by a woman he has, with total indifference, brought to grief. As Condon himself wrote some years later,
...Victoriano Munoz certainly deserved to die for what he had done in my first novel....The admirable Duchess of Dos Cortes, who murdered him, was very religious, and I was her old deity, poor woman. She implored me for permission to kill him for his most heinous crimes against her, and I had to so rule.
Plot
Painted in Paris, the reproductions are brought into Spain by Bourne's wife, an upper-class young American girl named Eve Lewis, who loves Bourne in spite of his criminality. In the first few dozen pages of the book Bourne successfully steals, with no twinges of remorse, three masterpieces from the castle of his supposed friend, the Duchess of Dos Cortes, and arranges for his wife to smuggle them to Paris for a highly profitable sale. When she arrives in Paris, however, she discovers that the mailing tube in which the paintings were being carried is now empty. The rest of the book is the narrative of their downhill path, as well as that of most of those people unlucky enough to have found themselves in their orbit.
Although Bourne has always fancied himself a master criminal, he is tracked by other criminals who are equally intelligent. The downhill path for all of the book's characters begins when Bourne is coerced into accepting a seemingly impossible task: to steal one of the world's most famous masterpieces, the Dos de Mayo, or Second of May or Charge of the Marmelukes, by Francisco de Goya, from its tightly guarded quarters in the national museum of Spain, the Prado. Adding to the difficulty of the task is the sheer size of the painting: it measures eight feet high by 11 feet wide.
By the last page of what begun as a light-hearted caper story, all of the principal characters, and some of the minor ones, are either dead, among the walking dead, or incarcerated for life. The very last words of the book are an apt summation: "His ruined face stared. She screamed. She screamed again. She could not stop screaming."
Concept and creation
In 1955 Condon, then 40 years old and a longtime New York publicist and Hollywood employee of various studios, was the publicity agent for The Pride and the PassionThe Pride and the Passion
The Pride and the Passion is a historical film drama starring Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren made by Stanley Kramer Productions. Set in the Napoleonic era, it is the story of a British officer who has orders to retrieve a huge cannon from Spain and take it to the British forces by ship...
, a film starring Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
and Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren, OMRI is an Italian actress.In 1962, Loren won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Two Women, along with 21 awards, becoming the first actress to win an Academy Award for a non-English-speaking performance...
being shot in Spain. As he writes in his memoir, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra, he was present at a scene being filmed in the ancient rectory of the Escorial, the massive palace and cathedral outside Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. The enormous lights needed to film the scene
"revealed dozens upon dozens of great masterpieces of paintings that had not been seen for centuries, hung frame touching frame—the work of Goya, Velasquez, the great Dutch masters, and the most gifted masters of the Italian Renaissance...The idea of masterpieces of Spanish painting hanging in stone castles all over Spain, high and invisible in the darkness, stayed with me and gradually formed itself into a novel called The Oldest Confession....
Back in New York, Condon began turning his initial concept into a screenplay—until his wife pointed out, correctly, that he was writing it in the past tense instead of the present, which is obligatory for screenplays, and that it should be turned into a novel. Condon followed her advice and the book was published to favorable reviews not long afterwards.
Publication and the movies
Even before it was published in April 1958, twelve film companies had initiated talks about purchasing rights to it, a highly unusual amount of interest for an unpublished first novel. In a brief mention in The New York Times about the forthcoming book, "Condon explained without divulging details of the plot, [the theme] 'Is one of need. Half the need, love. The other half, greed.'" The movie version was released in 1962 as The Happy Thieves, starring Rex HarrisonRex Harrison
Sir Reginald Carey “Rex” Harrison was an English actor of stage and screen. Harrison won an Academy Award and two Tony Awards.-Youth and stage career:...
and Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth was an American film actress and dancer who attained fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars...
, and was dismissed by The New York Times as a "limp herring" of "the devastating first novel."
Style and Condonian quirks
- The novel offers first glimpses of many of the traits and stylistic tricks that were typical of Condon's later novels, among them, as the playwright George AxelrodGeorge AxelrodGeorge Axelrod was an American screenwriter, producer, playwright and film director, best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch , which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe...
once put it, "the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors". A selection of these from the opening pages:
The duchess was... a tribal yo-yo on a string eight hundred years long....
Bourne always sat uncommonly still... a monument to his own nerves which bayed like bloodhounds at the moon of his ambition.
...the giant gestures of throwing the ball from the long baskets as Van Gogh might have tried to throw off despair only to have it bound back at him from some crazy new angle.
- Also making a debut was Condon's delight in creating long lists of madcap and strangely juxaposed items such as:
...the dutchess [inherited] the ownership of approximately eighteen per cent of the population of Spain inclusive with farms, mines, factories, breweries, houses, forests, rocks, vineyards and holdings in eleven countries of the world including shares in a major league baseball club in North America, an ice cream company in Mexico, quite a few diamonds in South Africa, a Chinese restaurant on Rue François 1er in Paris, a television tube factory in Manila, and in geisha houses in Nagasaki and Kobe.
- Most of Condon's novels feature brief appearances, or sometimes only off-stage mentions, of characters named after real-life friends of the author. In a number of books, for instance, a character named Keifetz appears, named apparently for Robert Keifetz, a New York City author who wrote a novel about a major league baseball player called The Sensation—that novel was dedicated to Condon. In The Oldest Confession, a character has lunch in a Paris bistro and briefly meets two people playing chess at the bar, "Buchwald and Nolan, newspaper and airline peons respectively." Buchwald is certainly Art BuchwaldArt BuchwaldArthur Buchwald was an American humorist best known for his long-running column in The Washington Post, which in turn was carried as a syndicated column in many other newspapers. His column focused on political satire and commentary...
, the celebrated newspaper columnist and humorist, who, at the time of the book's publication, was still working for The International Herald-Tribune, which was published in Paris, where Condon had also lived during the 1950s. The identity of Nolan, however, remains a mystery.
- In spite of the admiring statement of the Times reviewer quoted earlier that "Condon's is a fully controlled job of writing rather than an ardent grope. Written throughout with painstaking grace, not one scene or description is ever thrown away," Condon does, however, occasionally slip into pretentious, emotionally overheated, prose, a trait that would characterise his latter works as well. Early in the book, for instance, in a paragraph discussing "criminality", in which, with typical Condon brio, he compares the kind of "infantile discipline" that a master criminal needs to that of a small boy "who will work to remember baseball batting averages back to Napoleon Lajoie," he goes on to write:
"It is greed with a social sense removed because what is there to be taken must be taken by the criminal consistent with his inner resources, eliminating envy, a much smaller sin."
- It is hard to find much real meaning in this.
- Also typical of later Condon works is his precise detailing of the peripheral deaths and injuries to innocent bystanders caused by some particularly careless or coldblooded act committed by one of the characters, sometimes by the book's sympathetically drawn protagonist. Dr. Muñoz of The Oldest Confession is far from sympathetic—he is repellent even—and when he sets out to create an "extraordinary diversion", one that will instantly have all of MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
buzzing while Bourne carries out the actual theft of the Goya painting, he makes himself even more detestable. After carrying out the first step of the diversion demanded by Bourne:
The crowd rioted at the bull ring.... Two children and one woman were trampled to death; twenty-six persons were injured, nine seriously. Two men, seated sixty yards apart in separate sections of the plaza, had been pointed at as having thrown the knife but miraculously had been saved from the mob by courageous police.
- Finally, we have the first mentions of a phrase that is more closely associated with The Manchurian Candidate than this book and that may also have appeared in other works by Condon. On page 142 James Bourne is at his grandiloquent worst as he once again tries to justify his criminality to Eve: "I am you and you are me and what can we do for the salvation of each other?". Two hundred pages later, as the book comes to its tragic conclusion, one broken woman tries to console another with an equally long-winded speech that ends with, "I am you and you are me and what have we done to each other?" A year later, with the publication of the book that was to make Condon famous, we find, on a frontis page of The Manchurian Candidate, two separate ephigraphs, one supposedly from the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, and the other, shorter one, from The Keener's Manual: "I am you and you are me and what have we done to each other?"
Critical appraisal
Gerald Walker, in the Sunday book review section of the New York Times of June 22, 1958, wrote a favorable review called "Urbane Insiders". It managed to completely avoid giving his readers much more than a cursory clue as to what the book was about. One of his paragraphs (omitted here) was devoted to another, earlier work by another author about art forgeries, but, aside from that hint, his review is little more than generalities. It was, nevertheless, a fine inaugural reception in a most important media outlet for a hitherto unknown 43-year-old author:Unlike most other first novels, Richard Condon's is a fully controlled job of writing rather than an ardent grope. Written throughout with painstaking grace, not one scene or description is ever thrown away or treated in a commonplace manner. Everything is handled, and handled well, from the viewpoint of the cosmopolitan insider who knows everything there is to know about such urbane things as art critics, European customs inspectors, wire services, bullfights and fine food and drink.
And yet the one thing the author is unable to convey is any feeling of depth, of real mortality unfolding before the reader. The deterioration of James Bournes, Ivy League master criminal, is singularly unmoving even as one stunningly dramatic scene or ingeniuous plot-turn follows another....
If, the next time out, he can manage to open up and write more personally without marring his exceedingly refined sense of literary form, then we shall really be seeing a book. As things are now, no apologies are necessary to anyone for this is quite an impressive debut.
Charles Poore, however, writing two months earlier in the daily Times, contented himself with a long synopsis of the story, finding "...a murderous sort of zaniness to Mr. Condon's plot" and remarking that "With a technique that requires all surprises and revelations to be undermined by fresh surprises and revelations, Mr. Condon spins everyone deeper and deeper into the plot."
Time magazine, the leading mid-brow American weekly for most of the 20th century, did not review The Oldest Confession. Over the next 30 years, however, they mentioned it at least six times, always favorably, and frequently as containing superior qualities that Condon's later novels generally failed to meet:
- In 1960 they called it "fine, mordant".
- In 1961 they wrote admiringly that, "A Condon novel has the sound and shape of a bagful of cats. In The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate and Some Angry Angel, Condon garnered fans with accounts, written in messianic exasperation, of criminal endeavor, fate's falling cornices, widespread venality...."
- In 1971 they cited the "foaming manias" of The Oldest Confession, and made the assessment that, "Condon was never a satirist: he was a riot in a satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works."
- In 1974, in yet another unfavorable review of his latest novel, they wrote: "His early books, The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate and A Talent for Loving, are among the maddest funny novels of the last couple of decades. They seemed to have been written by Mephistopheles, raucous with glee at the insane excesses of the human creature."
- In 1977 they grudgingly admitted that, for his latest novel, The Abandoned Woman, "Condon's style, which has seemed preachy and sodden in recent years, achieves some of the snap and malice that enlivened such earlier works as The Oldest Confession and The Manchurian Candidate."
- In 1988, 30 years after his inaugural novel, they wrote, in a review of the third PrizziPrizziPrizzi is a town and comune of 5,711 inhabitants in the Italian province of Palermo, on the island of Sicily. It is located south of the city of Palermo at an altitude of 696 m above sea level on a hill in the upper valley of the River Sosio...
novel, "In Condon's mad early novels—The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate—marvelous characters seethed with venality and obsession."
External links
- http://tegularius.org/keener.html - a website about "The Keener's Manual"