![]() ![]() ![]() The movie which inevitably followed is crisper and more dramatic than its source (the novel, for example tells us about Brig's homosexual affair as soon as his character is described, whereas in the film it becomes a bombshell) and has Charles Laughton to provide a degree of menace and eccentricity in the character of the southern senator, Seabright Cooley, qualities which are less evident in the book because of Drury's insistence on providing a rational, indeed principled, motivation for even his more reprehensible characters. ![]() `It just gets a little mixed up sometimes.' "Īdvise and Consent won the Pulitzer Prize and sold more than a million copies. ![]() Drury's primary achievement is to reflect the strange combination of idealism and patriotism on the one hand, and cynicism and knavery on the other, which can still be found in the politics of the United States (and of everywhere else, come to that), though it is slightly unnerving to find this paradoxical juxtaposition being handled without irony: " `It is a wonderful country,' the director of the Post said. The many characters (there's a cast list at the beginning of the novel) simply represent points of view, which are elaborated in pages of rather heavy-handed dialogue, interrupted by lyrical evocations of Washington in various weather conditions, and substantial essays on the background of the principal players. Despite the complications of the protagonists' personal lives, and the deviousness of their political stratagems, there is no psychological complexity in the book. ![]()
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