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]
