“This is a work of fiction,” says the bold type on the copyright page of Robert Harris’ The Ghost. “Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.”

Yeah, right.

True, the novel’s imaginary former British prime minister (he quit because his slavish obedience to an incompetent U.S. president led to a disastrous war in the Middle East) is called Adam Lang. True, Lang went to Cambridge (not Oxford) where he spent most of his time treading the boards (not playing guitar in a rock band). True, Lang is getting it on with his babelicious blond aide, and nobody laid that particular charge at the door of the guy you might be thinking of. Nor did anyone ever suggest that that guy’s wife—you know, the one who, like Ruth Lang, was famously “smarter than her husband” and infamously “loved their life at the top”—would put out for a lowly hack.

The hack in question is so lowly he makes his living turning daylong interviews with flavor-of-the-month celebrities into “misery memoirs.” Now, though, our titular Ghost has to alchemize Lang’s tedious ragbag of exculpatory bleatings into a gold-plated best seller. He has to do so, moreover, in just one month—and with the knowledge that the task proved so much for his predecessor that the poor guy drowned himself in suspicious circumstances. Sounds like a job for Superman.

Thankfully, Mr. Harris’ resolutely anonymous protagonist never transmutes into anything resembling an all-conquering action man. Though guns and brass knuckles, SWAT cops and Bond-villain-style lairs all figure in The Ghost, our man at the center of it all remains somewhat less than heroic. Even the book’s shock-horror revelation—so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain—comes about only because our man accidentally switches a sat-nav on.

That shock, though, is the only one in the book. The Ghost kicks off in predictably thrilling style, but before long it’s all become unthrillingly predictable. Anyone vaguely literate will foresee the moves of Mr. Harris’ pawns long before they have been shoved about the board of his plot. Given that they’re merely pawns, by the way, I’m not sure it was wise of Mr. Harris to allow his narrator to say that his “fundamental problem with our former prime minister” is that he’s “not a psychologically credible character.”

Nor are matters improved by the novel’s air of mocking self-consciousness. Just who, for instance, is talking here: “I was still smarting from [Ruth Lang’s] crack about my not being a proper writer. Perhaps I’m not. … I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.” If Robert Harris’ sales record is any indication, many people will want to buy The Ghost. But if a basket had this many holes in it, I’d be asking for my money back.

Christopher Bray Lives in London where he is working on a book about Sean Connery.

There are many reasons to be ashamed of being an Englishman, but the main one is the continued existence of our constitutional monarchy: Britain is one of the most secular countries in the modern world, yet its people are still reigned over by a queen deemed to have a divine right to do so.

With that divine right, needless to say, comes an awful lot of divine dough. The man who is to be our next king is an ill-tempered ignoramus who has done not one honest day’s work. Yet he can afford to employ someone to squeeze toothpaste onto his toothbrush—even royal teeth need cleaning after one has breakfasted on whichever of the eight eggs one’s early-morning cook has boiled best for one.

The absurdities of the rich will always be with us, of course. But the big argument against the monarchy is not that they have all the riches, but that their very existence puts a stop to a lot of other people getting rich too. The American Dream may for most Americans be nothing more than a dream, but at least the reverie is available to you enviable lot. For us Brits, the strictures of the class system, which is topped out by the queen and her many hangers-on, ensure that we are far less productive than just about any other industrialized nation. Why try hard, when no matter how hard you try, you’re never going to get to the top?

Nonsense, says Jeremy Paxman in his entertaining, unenlightening new book. A normal child of the postwar settlement years, Mr. Paxman grew up wanting to abolish Britain’s monarchy. But there comes a time, he says, when you must put away childish things, and although his republicanism took longer to fade away than other aspects of his “teenage truculence,” fade away it has. It’s an argument of sorts, though rather less convincing than the one that says Mr. Paxman—a journalistic Rottweiler when it comes to dealing with politicians—has changed his mind simply because the royals have befriended him (or, depending on your point of view, bought him off). Certainly the liveliest bits of his book are those passages wherein he describes amicable weekends at one of Prince Charles’ several country piles (where one’s underpants, no matter how disgracefully soiled, no matter how well concealed from one’s valet’s view, will be washed and pressed and returned pristine the next morning).

But the fact that Mr. Paxman finds the prince likable—just as I warmed to the prince’s father, Philip, when he simple-mindedly let slip to another journalist that his wife isn’t interested in anything “[u]nless it eats grass and farts”—is neither here nor there. That Elizabeth Windsor has worked hard at her job does not mean that the job needs doing. In fact, it not only does not need doing—if Britain is to thrive in the frosty uplands of the global market, it needs not doing.

And Jeremy Paxman’s Very Polite Inquiry is too polite by half.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

It was early May 2005. The stuff on the microfilm was really good, and I was running behind for the dinner I had planned with my parents, a quick stop in the Bay Area before I returned home to Los Angeles. I called from the library to let them know I would be late. And that’s how I found out that I really needed to call Los Angeles right now, because there was a telegram of some kind, and Ann had opened the envelope.

It turns out I had been mistaken when I’d assured her there was “no way in hell” the Army would ever call me back from the inactive reserves. I didn’t believe it until she faxed the telegram. And then—words fail me—I did believe.

I had enlisted in the Army as an infantryman in the spring of 1999, with a set of hard-to-explain plans and intentions that might be summarized around two contradictory sets of ideas. On the one hand, I wanted to live more seriously and confront something difficult, breaking free of the vaguely connected freelance-writerness of my life; on the other hand, I thought I would score some really good copy out of the experience, like a more heavily armed Ted Conover.

And there was Yugoslavia, or whatever was left of it. The 90’s were—let’s go ahead and simplify—the era of the peacekeeping military, so joining seemed like a morally worthwhile use of time. The United States Army was confronting evil, ending conflicts, soothing troubled regions. Bob Hope also used to have a variety show, and gas was a nickel.

In any case, I never performed any great moral intervention overseas. I was assigned to a training-support battalion at Fort Benning, Ga., and spent two years sweeping the motor pool. Then I got out and, at the remarkable moment of late September 2001, was moved to the Individual Ready Reserve. A few months later, I met Ann, and promptly lied to her about my military obligation. Although, as I keep reminding her, it was totally not on purpose.

When the telegram came, I was in my second year of a Ph.D. program in American history at UCLA. Ann and I had been thinking about getting married, and suddenly there was no time to wait. I drove back that night, after a hurried dinner, smelling farm fields all the way down the center of the state. I remember the telegram in my hand, and Ann on the couch in front of me. “Well, fuck,” I said. “We should get married.”

Several friends would suggest that the whole thing was “so 1941,” which I think was meant to convey romance. We’re both still trying to see it. Especially given the casino in the background of the wedding photos.

I also went to close out my obligations at UCLA, where I had been churning through quaintly formatted media. The Cal State Sacramento library had drawn me to its microfilm room with a set of Indian Territory newspapers from the turn of the 20th century, the years of American war in the newly acquired Philippines; I had wanted to read what people displaced by American expansion had to say about other people who were suddenly confronted by American expansion. Now my grad-school friends had a running joke: I had wanted to study American empire, and now, yuk yuk, I’d have a really good chance to do it. This is an example of grad-student humor. In the classroom, the undergrads in History 13B applauded like an audience at a play when the professor announced that one of their teaching assistants would be leaving for Iraq. None of them apparently planned to follow. I graded my share of their final exams in the hotel during an abbreviated honeymoon. Then I got on the plane for the trip back to Fort Benning, to join the wartime Army.

The plan was to reintroduce the basics of the infantryman’s job to the 80 or so of us who bothered to show up. After paperwork and medical screenings, we were scheduled for weapons refresher courses and PowerPoint presentations on things like the importance of brushing your teeth in a combat zone. Rather than getting our own time on the firing range, we were supposed to piggyback on soldiers still in basic training. “Who the fuck are you?” the drill sergeant asked the first time our bus pulled up to a firing range. Other days, we took the bus to an empty range, waited for the regular trainees to show up and eventually left when they didn’t. Away from the ranges, a sergeant interrupted one PowerPoint presentation to announce that a lieutenant colonel would come by shortly to welcome us back. The lieutenant colonel never showed.

After a month in Georgia, we were sent to Camp Shelby, Miss., where we would train with an understaffed National Guard unit from Wisconsin. We got off the buses in Mississippi and started over: A new set of clerks painstakingly retyped the forms we had watched other clerks type at Fort Benning. A new set of doctors and nurses took us through the same medical screening. And we watched the same welcome-back PowerPoint presentations—except at Camp Shelby, the cadre had become so bored with the presentations that they videotaped themselves reading from the slides and just played the videos for us. I say again: 1. videotapes of 2. PowerPoint presentations that 3. we had already seen. After that came more waiting.

Our Wisconsin battalion showed up a month later, and we learned that we had been assigned to a year of guard duty in Kuwait. We would protect American military facilities against attack in a place where American military facilities weren’t being attacked. Since the Wisconsin National Guard had been hit hard by the war, our infantry battalion had been cobbled together from other units and filled in with cooks, clerks and assorted technicians. And inactive reserves. Our new commander had described his battalion to reporters in his home state as “the dustpan for the state of Wisconsin.”

The dustpan trained on scraps of old narrative. One day, late in our training, we pretended to defend a forward operating base carved out of the dense Mississippi woods to simulate the deserts of the Middle East, complete with simulated Iraqis. Before the simulation—this is the Army—we got a series of PowerPoint briefings. So we would understand the simulated Iraqis, there was a presentation on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. Reading word for word, the sergeant first class who droned through the slides assured us that the insurgents would lose steam once Saddam Hussein was captured. At this point, he already had been. And they hadn’t.

A reporter and photographer from the battalion’s home state joined us at the simulated F.O.B., as Mississippi locals in traditional Arab garb approached the gates, fixin’ to wage some real bad jihad. The press wore their best Anderson Cooper body armor, though we were slouching through the training with blank rounds. As reporters do, they had skipped the PowerPoint prelude in the classroom to go straight to the exciting part, and so filed a breathless story—later mailed to Mississippi and circulated around battalion headquarters—in which the Army provided tough and highly realistic training, in scenarios drawn straight from the battlefields of Iraq.

While we trained, pretended to train and waited to train, we talked about what we were doing there. The specialist in the bunk below mine was a volunteer who had already been to Iraq and thought he had signed up to go back there. Combat-zone income is tax-exempt; he was hoping to buy a new car for his wife. They had their eyes on a Hyundai. Another National Guard soldier described his job back home—union gig, security, great pay, plenty of days off—and then said that he planned to enlist in the regular Army as soon as his National Guard deployment was over. The job back home was all right and everything, but the military lifestyle was unbeatable: You never have to pay rent, he said, and you get your food and doctor visits “for free.”

A rumor—false, it turned out—began to circulate: The battalion was now over-strength and was preparing to dump the reservists it had added. That wouldn’t mean that we I.R.R. soldiers were done; it would mean we couldn’t even start yet. We wouldn’t be released from active duty till we had spent a year overseas. If this Kuwait assignment fell through, we would be warehoused at Camp Shelby until another battalion might show up needing bodies. Anxious to get on with it, I jumped to an open job in our tactical operations center, to avoid being bumped back to the waiting room.

And that was how I ended up in Kuwait, watching television on the graveyard shift in battalion headquarters. I am a shift sergeant. In theory, I supervise a radio operator and assist the officer in charge of the battalion’s tactical operations. Since the tactical operations have so far mostly involved driving around in the Kuwaiti desert and waving at camels, the job has yet to offer any significant challenges. Patrol reports come in by e-mail, describing the routes to be patrolled, and I number them; then the patrols are completed, and I file the final reports: Enemy contact, none. Battle damage, none. The Armed Forces Network edited the hell out of Scarface, by the way.

This is an improvement over the routine of my first few months in Kuwait. I started my foreign tour on loan to the Army’s training office—as (I quote the officer in charge) the office’s “detail bitch.” On one busy day, I put together a file folder set and cleaned off a senior sergeant’s desk. He had become tired of the clutter.

Saturday mornings were the training meeting, with military officers and contractors driving in from all over Kuwait to resolve common issues. At my first meeting, they argued over which budget would pay for a set of orange plastic safety cones that were needed to mark training boundaries. The military is full of men who like to play at being intensely Glengarry Glen Ross, even when the context doesn’t quite serve the drama. They tended to go something like: “You wanna go hardball on this, Jim, we can go ahead. I know how to play that game to the wall, brother, so bring it on, and we’ll see whose nuts get crushed when the game gets played. But you better just know this, and I shit you not: That 180 bucks for damn sure ain’t comin’ out of my fucking budget.” It’s more painful to watch this stuff when you’re 8,000 miles from home. It goes on for hours.

Like the specialist who volunteered for war because there would be a Hyundai at the end of it, the people having these discussions rarely seem to connect them to the larger project. I assume people notice we’re at war, across the border, a few miles up the road. But it’s one of the consistent surprises how little anyone mentions it. Serving in a rear area during wartime is like serving in an insurance company, or the department of motor vehicles.

Outside of work, life is whatever can be managed on a big square piece of dirt, ringed with gun towers and concertina wire and looking like a medium-security prison somewhere outside Barstow. Our camp sits off the grid in the middle of the desert, powered by generators and fed water by trucks. But the televisions: The televisions go on forever, like the gentleness of the Buddha. When I arrived, a recreation building and a big tent on the camp were crammed full of television sets, and a big TV hung in the TOC above my desk, and giant televisions sat in every corner of every dining facility. The PX sold television sets and DVD players, and our tents and trailers filled up with them.

And then it was a few months later, and the U.S.O. opened a new and very large recreation tent on the camp. It turned out to be, yes, full of television sets. Another month, and construction was complete on a big stage near the PX. Mounted to the back: a giant screen, where the camp recreation staff projects movies and television shows. We recently watched the Miss Hooters International competition, 30 feet high on the back wall. Somewhere in a military office in the Middle East sits the manager responsible for making sure we have enough television sets to win the war. If anyone happens to know where he is, you can tell him to stop.

And you could probably pass that message to someone else, too. When I arrived, the Baskin-Robbins station was already a major part of the dessert bar, to supplement a freezer case full of ice-cream bars near the dining facility exits. Then a few months passed, and I looked up during lunch to see the staff—on hire from Pakistan and the Philippines, the same pool of cheap labor that pumps the oil in the same desert—wheeling in a new soft-serve machine. Someone had decided that we did not yet have enough ice cream. We did. Whatever else you can say about this war, we’ll always have enough ice cream.

It was early May 2005. The stuff on the microfilm was really good, and I was running behind for the dinner I had planned with my parents, a quick stop in the Bay Area before I returned home to Los Angeles. I called from the library to let them know I would be late. And that’s how I found out that I really needed to call Los Angeles right now, because there was a telegram of some kind, and Ann had opened the envelope.

It turns out I had been mistaken when I’d assured her there was “no way in hell” the Army would ever call me back from the inactive reserves. I didn’t believe it until she faxed the telegram. And then—words fail me—I did believe.

I had enlisted in the Army as an infantryman in the spring of 1999, with a set of hard-to-explain plans and intentions that might be summarized around two contradictory sets of ideas. On the one hand, I wanted to live more seriously and confront something difficult, breaking free of the vaguely connected freelance-writerness of my life; on the other hand, I thought I would score some really good copy out of the experience, like a more heavily armed Ted Conover.

And there was Yugoslavia, or whatever was left of it. The 90’s were—let’s go ahead and simplify—the era of the peacekeeping military, so joining seemed like a morally worthwhile use of time. The United States Army was confronting evil, ending conflicts, soothing troubled regions. Bob Hope also used to have a variety show, and gas was a nickel.

In any case, I never performed any great moral intervention overseas. I was assigned to a training-support battalion at Fort Benning, Ga., and spent two years sweeping the motor pool. Then I got out and, at the remarkable moment of late September 2001, was moved to the Individual Ready Reserve. A few months later, I met Ann, and promptly lied to her about my military obligation. Although, as I keep reminding her, it was totally not on purpose.

When the telegram came, I was in my second year of a Ph.D. program in American history at UCLA. Ann and I had been thinking about getting married, and suddenly there was no time to wait. I drove back that night, after a hurried dinner, smelling farm fields all the way down the center of the state. I remember the telegram in my hand, and Ann on the couch in front of me. “Well, fuck,” I said. “We should get married.”

Several friends would suggest that the whole thing was “so 1941,” which I think was meant to convey romance. We’re both still trying to see it. Especially given the casino in the background of the wedding photos.

I also went to close out my obligations at UCLA, where I had been churning through quaintly formatted media. The Cal State Sacramento library had drawn me to its microfilm room with a set of Indian Territory newspapers from the turn of the 20th century, the years of American war in the newly acquired Philippines; I had wanted to read what people displaced by American expansion had to say about other people who were suddenly confronted by American expansion. Now my grad-school friends had a running joke: I had wanted to study American empire, and now, yuk yuk, I’d have a really good chance to do it. This is an example of grad-student humor. In the classroom, the undergrads in History 13B applauded like an audience at a play when the professor announced that one of their teaching assistants would be leaving for Iraq. None of them apparently planned to follow. I graded my share of their final exams in the hotel during an abbreviated honeymoon. Then I got on the plane for the trip back to Fort Benning, to join the wartime Army.

The plan was to reintroduce the basics of the infantryman’s job to the 80 or so of us who bothered to show up. After paperwork and medical screenings, we were scheduled for weapons refresher courses and PowerPoint presentations on things like the importance of brushing your teeth in a combat zone. Rather than getting our own time on the firing range, we were supposed to piggyback on soldiers still in basic training. “Who the fuck are you?” the drill sergeant asked the first time our bus pulled up to a firing range. Other days, we took the bus to an empty range, waited for the regular trainees to show up and eventually left when they didn’t. Away from the ranges, a sergeant interrupted one PowerPoint presentation to announce that a lieutenant colonel would come by shortly to welcome us back. The lieutenant colonel never showed.

After a month in Georgia, we were sent to Camp Shelby, Miss., where we would train with an understaffed National Guard unit from Wisconsin. We got off the buses in Mississippi and started over: A new set of clerks painstakingly retyped the forms we had watched other clerks type at Fort Benning. A new set of doctors and nurses took us through the same medical screening. And we watched the same welcome-back PowerPoint presentations—except at Camp Shelby, the cadre had become so bored with the presentations that they videotaped themselves reading from the slides and just played the videos for us. I say again: 1. videotapes of 2. PowerPoint presentations that 3. we had already seen. After that came more waiting.

Our Wisconsin battalion showed up a month later, and we learned that we had been assigned to a year of guard duty in Kuwait. We would protect American military facilities against attack in a place where American military facilities weren’t being attacked. Since the Wisconsin National Guard had been hit hard by the war, our infantry battalion had been cobbled together from other units and filled in with cooks, clerks and assorted technicians. And inactive reserves. Our new commander had described his battalion to reporters in his home state as “the dustpan for the state of Wisconsin.”

The dustpan trained on scraps of old narrative. One day, late in our training, we pretended to defend a forward operating base carved out of the dense Mississippi woods to simulate the deserts of the Middle East, complete with simulated Iraqis. Before the simulation—this is the Army—we got a series of PowerPoint briefings. So we would understand the simulated Iraqis, there was a presentation on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. Reading word for word, the sergeant first class who droned through the slides assured us that the insurgents would lose steam once Saddam Hussein was captured. At this point, he already had been. And they hadn’t.

A reporter and photographer from the battalion’s home state joined us at the simulated F.O.B., as Mississippi locals in traditional Arab garb approached the gates, fixin’ to wage some real bad jihad. The press wore their best Anderson Cooper body armor, though we were slouching through the training with blank rounds. As reporters do, they had skipped the PowerPoint prelude in the classroom to go straight to the exciting part, and so filed a breathless story—later mailed to Mississippi and circulated around battalion headquarters—in which the Army provided tough and highly realistic training, in scenarios drawn straight from the battlefields of Iraq.

While we trained, pretended to train and waited to train, we talked about what we were doing there. The specialist in the bunk below mine was a volunteer who had already been to Iraq and thought he had signed up to go back there. Combat-zone income is tax-exempt; he was hoping to buy a new car for his wife. They had their eyes on a Hyundai. Another National Guard soldier described his job back home—union gig, security, great pay, plenty of days off—and then said that he planned to enlist in the regular Army as soon as his National Guard deployment was over. The job back home was all right and everything, but the military lifestyle was unbeatable: You never have to pay rent, he said, and you get your food and doctor visits “for free.”

A rumor—false, it turned out—began to circulate: The battalion was now over-strength and was preparing to dump the reservists it had added. That wouldn’t mean that we I.R.R. soldiers were done; it would mean we couldn’t even start yet. We wouldn’t be released from active duty till we had spent a year overseas. If this Kuwait assignment fell through, we would be warehoused at Camp Shelby until another battalion might show up needing bodies. Anxious to get on with it, I jumped to an open job in our tactical operations center, to avoid being bumped back to the waiting room.

And that was how I ended up in Kuwait, watching television on the graveyard shift in battalion headquarters. I am a shift sergeant. In theory, I supervise a radio operator and assist the officer in charge of the battalion’s tactical operations. Since the tactical operations have so far mostly involved driving around in the Kuwaiti desert and waving at camels, the job has yet to offer any significant challenges. Patrol reports come in by e-mail, describing the routes to be patrolled, and I number them; then the patrols are completed, and I file the final reports: Enemy contact, none. Battle damage, none. The Armed Forces Network edited the hell out of Scarface, by the way.

This is an improvement over the routine of my first few months in Kuwait. I started my foreign tour on loan to the Army’s training office—as (I quote the officer in charge) the office’s “detail bitch.” On one busy day, I put together a file folder set and cleaned off a senior sergeant’s desk. He had become tired of the clutter.

Saturday mornings were the training meeting, with military officers and contractors driving in from all over Kuwait to resolve common issues. At my first meeting, they argued over which budget would pay for a set of orange plastic safety cones that were needed to mark training boundaries. The military is full of men who like to play at being intensely Glengarry Glen Ross, even when the context doesn’t quite serve the drama. They tended to go something like: “You wanna go hardball on this, Jim, we can go ahead. I know how to play that game to the wall, brother, so bring it on, and we’ll see whose nuts get crushed when the game gets played. But you better just know this, and I shit you not: That 180 bucks for damn sure ain’t comin’ out of my fucking budget.” It’s more painful to watch this stuff when you’re 8,000 miles from home. It goes on for hours.

Like the specialist who volunteered for war because there would be a Hyundai at the end of it, the people having these discussions rarely seem to connect them to the larger project. I assume people notice we’re at war, across the border, a few miles up the road. But it’s one of the consistent surprises how little anyone mentions it. Serving in a rear area during wartime is like serving in an insurance company, or the department of motor vehicles.

Outside of work, life is whatever can be managed on a big square piece of dirt, ringed with gun towers and concertina wire and looking like a medium-security prison somewhere outside Barstow. Our camp sits off the grid in the middle of the desert, powered by generators and fed water by trucks. But the televisions: The televisions go on forever, like the gentleness of the Buddha. When I arrived, a recreation building and a big tent on the camp were crammed full of television sets, and a big TV hung in the TOC above my desk, and giant televisions sat in every corner of every dining facility. The PX sold television sets and DVD players, and our tents and trailers filled up with them.

And then it was a few months later, and the U.S.O. opened a new and very large recreation tent on the camp. It turned out to be, yes, full of television sets. Another month, and construction was complete on a big stage near the PX. Mounted to the back: a giant screen, where the camp recreation staff projects movies and television shows. We recently watched the Miss Hooters International competition, 30 feet high on the back wall. Somewhere in a military office in the Middle East sits the manager responsible for making sure we have enough television sets to win the war. If anyone happens to know where he is, you can tell him to stop.

And you could probably pass that message to someone else, too. When I arrived, the Baskin-Robbins station was already a major part of the dessert bar, to supplement a freezer case full of ice-cream bars near the dining facility exits. Then a few months passed, and I looked up during lunch to see the staff—on hire from Pakistan and the Philippines, the same pool of cheap labor that pumps the oil in the same desert—wheeling in a new soft-serve machine. Someone had decided that we did not yet have enough ice cream. We did. Whatever else you can say about this war, we’ll always have enough ice cream.

The book is based on a true story. On April 30, 1975, in the small Czech town of Dvür Králové, 49 giraffes (23 of them pregnant) were gunned down and dismembered on government orders. Mr. Ledgard—for the past 11 years a foreign correspondent for The Economist—has fashioned from this bizarre, still unexplained incident a political parable that verges on the Kafkaesque. Stunned and ethereal, Giraffe begins like a dream but ends like a nightmare. Not for nothing is one of its narrators a sleepwalker.

But before we meet the sleepwalker, we meet Snêhurka: “I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed towards the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.” Not so the reader, who presses greedily on into this new-seen world, especially when the being doing the seeing turns out not to be human: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hoofs impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Cameleopardalis into the earth’s atmosphere.”

From here the book gets into what one feels obliged to call its lengthy stride, with Snêhurka and the rest of her tower captured and taken from the scorch of the African Savannah to the gray chill of an Eastern European zoo. Also along for the ride is Emil, a specialist in hemodynamics whose day job is designing space suits for astronauts and whose knowledge of the blood flow of tall creatures has been deemed useful for the transportation. In the company of his charges, though, Emil’s clear-sighted rationalism is soon replaced by a light-headed worship. He can’t get enough of these wondrous beasts “and their rising blood.” “ They are impossible,” he tells himself, “ there is no such animal.”

Equally impossible, Emil keeps telling us, is life under communist rule, a system whose “youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight” and which results in metaphysical stasis—a freeze-frame in which there is “no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing.” Hence Emil’s habit of mentally photographing what he sees as images of contentment. “This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture, I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.”

Lucky him. As Emil sees it, the rest of the populace is condemned to wandering aimlessly through state-organized chaos—rather like those poor captive giraffes in his charge. Rather, but not quite. In fact, Mr. Ledgard’s book suggests, the Czechs have more in common with the okapi, the giraffe’s smaller cousins. They’ve never had to reach up for their food and have not, therefore, had the giraffe’s grace thrust upon them.

Beauty is the by-product of struggle, of the evolutionary command to adapt or die. But communism seeks to end history by the creation of utopia—literally, a non-place. Non-places call for non-people, of course—hence, Giraffe argues, the air of living death that hung about postwar Eastern Europe. It’s always best, in other words, to stick your neck out.

As a reporter for The Economist, Mr. Ledgard perhaps by definition writes from the right, but novelists need to come at a story from more than one direction if they’re to get anywhere near its truth. Giraffe is as laden down with agitprop as anything by Brecht. Pretty much everyone who talks in it says the same thing—that communism is even less than it’s cracked up to be. Worse, they say it in the same slow, numinous, image-heavy voice. Read aloud at random from the book and you will have no idea who’s talking. This would be a fault in any novel, but in a novel whose specific intent is to make clear the Identikit restrictions of a political system, it spells double trouble.

The good news is that, as the novel builds towards its bloody climax, Mr. Ledgard’s pulse quickens, and his prose grows more supple and muscular. The reason is simple: a new narrator, Jirí, who’s given not to abstract portentousness but to the concrete and tactile. The reluctant gunman hired by the state to kill the giraffes, Jirí takes us through the procedure with precision-detail disgust.

Mr. Ledgard really does serve up a vision of hell here, with Jirí atop a fence ordering a helper to shine a flashlight below the giraffes’ ears, the better for his bullets to penetrate the most vulnerable area of their craniums. Emil, meanwhile, is down on the ground, wading through blood and guts as the beasts are buckled and broken, the better to be thrown onto the trucks that will take them away. As a vision of death in life, it makes the novel’s droopily metaphoric moments look more pallid than ever. Like the communists he despises, Mr. Ledgard should leave the comforts of his ideas and beliefs behind and get to grips with the resistant world.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

The book is based on a true story. On April 30, 1975, in the small Czech town of Dvür Králové, 49 giraffes (23 of them pregnant) were gunned down and dismembered on government orders. Mr. Ledgard—for the past 11 years a foreign correspondent for The Economist—has fashioned from this bizarre, still unexplained incident a political parable that verges on the Kafkaesque. Stunned and ethereal, Giraffe begins like a dream but ends like a nightmare. Not for nothing is one of its narrators a sleepwalker.

But before we meet the sleepwalker, we meet Snêhurka: “I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed towards the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.” Not so the reader, who presses greedily on into this new-seen world, especially when the being doing the seeing turns out not to be human: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hoofs impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Cameleopardalis into the earth’s atmosphere.”

From here the book gets into what one feels obliged to call its lengthy stride, with Snêhurka and the rest of her tower captured and taken from the scorch of the African Savannah to the gray chill of an Eastern European zoo. Also along for the ride is Emil, a specialist in hemodynamics whose day job is designing space suits for astronauts and whose knowledge of the blood flow of tall creatures has been deemed useful for the transportation. In the company of his charges, though, Emil’s clear-sighted rationalism is soon replaced by a light-headed worship. He can’t get enough of these wondrous beasts “and their rising blood.” “They are impossible,” he tells himself, “there is no such animal.”

Equally impossible, Emil keeps telling us, is life under communist rule, a system whose “youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight” and which results in metaphysical stasis—a freeze-frame in which there is “no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing.” Hence Emil’s habit of mentally photographing what he sees as images of contentment. “This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture, I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.”

Lucky him. As Emil sees it, the rest of the populace is condemned to wandering aimlessly through state-organized chaos—rather like those poor captive giraffes in his charge. Rather, but not quite. In fact, Mr. Ledgard’s book suggests, the Czechs have more in common with the okapi, the giraffe’s smaller cousins. They’ve never had to reach up for their food and have not, therefore, had the giraffe’s grace thrust upon them.

Beauty is the by-product of struggle, of the evolutionary command to adapt or die. But communism seeks to end history by the creation of utopia—literally, a non-place. Non-places call for non-people, of course—hence, Giraffe argues, the air of living death that hung about postwar Eastern Europe. It’s always best, in other words, to stick your neck out.

As a reporter for The Economist, Mr. Ledgard perhaps by definition writes from the right, but novelists need to come at a story from more than one direction if they’re to get anywhere near its truth. Giraffe is as laden down with agitprop as anything by Brecht. Pretty much everyone who talks in it says the same thing—that communism is even less than it’s cracked up to be. Worse, they say it in the same slow, numinous, image-heavy voice. Read aloud at random from the book and you will have no idea who’s talking. This would be a fault in any novel, but in a novel whose specific intent is to make clear the Identikit restrictions of a political system, it spells double trouble.

The good news is that, as the novel builds towards its bloody climax, Mr. Ledgard’s pulse quickens, and his prose grows more supple and muscular. The reason is simple: a new narrator, Jirí, who’s given not to abstract portentousness but to the concrete and tactile. The reluctant gunman hired by the state to kill the giraffes, Jirí takes us through the procedure with precision-detail disgust.

Mr. Ledgard really does serve up a vision of hell here, with Jirí atop a fence ordering a helper to shine a flashlight below the giraffes’ ears, the better for his bullets to penetrate the most vulnerable area of their craniums. Emil, meanwhile, is down on the ground, wading through blood and guts as the beasts are buckled and broken, the better to be thrown onto the trucks that will take them away. As a vision of death in life, it makes the novel’s droopily metaphoric moments look more pallid than ever. Like the communists he despises, Mr. Ledgard should leave the comforts of his ideas and beliefs behind and get to grips with the resistant world.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

Bob Dylan is a senior citizen. That’s right: The voice of a generation, the voice that implored millions to “stay forever young,” hit 65 last month. Robert Zimmerman with the Zimmer Frame blues? Not quite. As anyone who’s caught a recent Dylan gig can vouch, this soi-disant song-and-dance man may not be Fred Astaire, but he’s steady enough on his feet. True, he moves slowly nowadays, an air of ponderous deliberation hanging about his every step. But he looks in remarkably good shape—as lean, if not as lissome, as the Dylan of 40-odd years ago. Could he, you wonder as he essays another shuffling shimmy to the mike, be putting us on?

It wouldn’t be the first time. As Jonathan Cott’s eclectic selection of five decades’ worth of interviews proves, Mr. Dylan is one of our age’s great jokers. Back in 1965, the young Nora Ephron met him and asked whether he agreed with fellow singer Carolyn Hester’s contention that “the new sound, ‘folk rock,’ is liberating.” “Did Carolyn say that?” he shot back. “You tell her she can come around and see me any time now that she’s liberated.” Battling gamely on, Ms. Ephron wondered whether Mr. Dylan’s songs are full of chaos. Yes, they are, he said, “Chaos, watermelon, clocks … ”—a random litany of nouns that reads like René Magritte, or perhaps the Marx Brothers. A minute later, Mr. Dylan was telling Ms. Ephron about his collection of monkey wrenches.

Yet such surrealist flights look like apprentice work when set next to Mr. Dylan’s 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, in which, among other things, Nat Hentoff asked whether jazz had “lost much of its appeal to the younger generation.” “I don’t think jazz has ever appealed to the younger generation,” said Mr. Dylan. “Anyway, I don’t really know who this younger generation is. I don’t think they could get into a jazz club anyway. But jazz is hard to follow; I mean you actually have to like jazz to follow it; and my motto is, never follow anything. I don’t know what the motto of the younger generation is, but I would think they’d have to follow their parents. I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of feathers? He’d say, ‘Who are you following?’ And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his belly button and say, ‘Jazz. Father, I’ve been following jazz.’ And his father would probably say, ‘Get a broom and clean up all that soot before you go to sleep.’ Then the kid’s mother would tell her friends, ‘Our little Donald, he’s part of the younger generation, you know.’”

The lengthy quote is unavoidable. Try unpicking a discharge of imagist logic like that and you’ll quickly find yourself tangled up in goo. Which is, of course, the point. We are dealing with a master at laying false trails. Certainly nothing Mr. Hentoff was told got him anywhere near what one hesitates to call the real Bob Dylan. One hesitates because no one has more vehemently denied the existence of Bob Dylan than Bob Dylan. As he says in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, after reading a tabloid-newspaper report of his putative 80-a-day cigarette habit, “I’m glad I’m not me.”

Whoever he is, Bob Dylan doesn’t role-play so much as play around with the very idea of roles. When Mr. Cott himself talked to Mr. Dylan about directing his first feature, Renaldo and Clara, he clarified its confused cast list thus: “There’s Renaldo … there’s a guy in whiteface singing on the stage, and then there’s Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is listed in the credits as playing Renaldo, yet Ronnie Hawkins is listed as playing Bob Dylan.” But Bob Dylan made the film, insisted Mr. Cott. “Bob Dylan didn’t make it,” replied Mr. Dylan in what one fervently hopes was the tone of mock exasperation he perfected for Mr. Pennebaker’s picture. “I made it.” Not for nothing was Mr. Dylan’s last movie called Masked and Anonymous.

Because for all his modernity, for all his cubist narratives and symbolist imagery, Mr. Dylan has never had any time for the 20th century’s cult of the id. Whatever else he may be doing as an artist, he’s adamant that he isn’t expressing himself. “The songs are the star of the show,” the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn quotes him as saying, “not me.” Yes, but he wrote them didn’t he? Not necessarily. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song,” he said of what is probably still his most iconic work, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Only at the level of craftsmanship is he willing to discuss writing: “I’m not thinking about what I want to say,” he told Mr. Hilburn. “I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’“ Little wonder Mr. Dylan admits to loving “Don’t Fence Me In” and what he calls Cole Porter’s “fearless” rhyming.

NOT SO MICHAEL GRAY, WHOSE LOATHING of such “supposedly sophisticated songs” is as profound as his love of Bob Dylan. The author of a 918-page study of Mr. Dylan’s art, Song and Dance Man, Mr. Gray has now written the 736-page Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, a book of such critical mass it comes complete with a searchable CD-ROM transcript. Type in the word “Hoagy” and you will be taken to this: “Carmichael is one of the many improbable people whose work and persona Dylan admires, possibly just to be perverse.” Type in the word “Sinatra” and you will learn that “your parents listen[ed] to [his] awful, syrupy music on their radiogram” and that his “musical world was the one rock ’n’ roll was born to abolish.” Well, maybe, though should Mr. Gray have turned on his own radiogram these past few weeks he might have heard a new D.J. on XM Radio discoursing worshipfully on the likes of Sinatra, Judy Garland, Glenn Miller, even Dean Martin. The D.J. in question is none other than Bob Dylan.

A critic needn’t like everything, of course, but if he’s to cut deep he must range wide. Mr. Gray knows his blues and his rock ’n’ roll—but that’s about all. Just as you wouldn’t trust a writer on classical music who told you the only guy that counted was Beethoven, so it’s hard to trust Mr. Gray even at those times when he seems level-headed. When he’s off his head, caterwauling at another writer on Dylan he deems to have got things wrong, he sounds like the worst sort of bitchy academic. Mr. Gray, who studied English under F.R. Leavis (from whom he’s inherited his teleologizing tantrums and canonizing curmudgeonliness), knows everything there is to know about Bob Dylan apart from the answer to the question: What know they of Dylan who only Dylan know? “Too much of nothing,” as Bob Dylan once sang—and that “just makes a fella mean.”

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

Bob Dylan is a senior citizen. That’s right: The voice of a generation, the voice that implored millions to “stay forever young,” hit 65 last month. Robert Zimmerman with the Zimmer Frame blues? Not quite. As anyone who’s caught a recent Dylan gig can vouch, this soi-disant song-and-dance man may not be Fred Astaire, but he’s steady enough on his feet. True, he moves slowly nowadays, an air of ponderous deliberation hanging about his every step. But he looks in remarkably good shape—as lean, if not as lissome, as the Dylan of 40-odd years ago. Could he, you wonder as he essays another shuffling shimmy to the mike, be putting us on?

It wouldn’t be the first time. As Jonathan Cott’s eclectic selection of five decades’ worth of interviews proves, Mr. Dylan is one of our age’s great jokers. Back in 1965, the young Nora Ephron met him and asked whether he agreed with fellow singer Carolyn Hester’s contention that “the new sound, ‘folk rock,’ is liberating.” “Did Carolyn say that?” he shot back. “You tell her she can come around and see me any time now that she’s liberated.” Battling gamely on, Ms. Ephron wondered whether Mr. Dylan’s songs are full of chaos. Yes, they are, he said, “Chaos, watermelon, clocks … ”—a random litany of nouns that reads like René Magritte, or perhaps the Marx Brothers. A minute later, Mr. Dylan was telling Ms. Ephron about his collection of monkey wrenches.

Yet such surrealist flights look like apprentice work when set next to Mr. Dylan’s 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, in which, among other things, Nat Hentoff asked whether jazz had “lost much of its appeal to the younger generation.” “I don’t think jazz has ever appealed to the younger generation,” said Mr. Dylan. “Anyway, I don’t really know who this younger generation is. I don’t think they could get into a jazz club anyway. But jazz is hard to follow; I mean you actually have to like jazz to follow it; and my motto is, never follow anything. I don’t know what the motto of the younger generation is, but I would think they’d have to follow their parents. I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of feathers? He’d say, ‘Who are you following?’ And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his belly button and say, ‘Jazz. Father, I’ve been following jazz.’ And his father would probably say, ‘Get a broom and clean up all that soot before you go to sleep.’ Then the kid’s mother would tell her friends, ‘Our little Donald, he’s part of the younger generation, you know.’”

The lengthy quote is unavoidable. Try unpicking a discharge of imagist logic like that and you’ll quickly find yourself tangled up in goo. Which is, of course, the point. We are dealing with a master at laying false trails. Certainly nothing Mr. Hentoff was told got him anywhere near what one hesitates to call the real Bob Dylan. One hesitates because no one has more vehemently denied the existence of Bob Dylan than Bob Dylan. As he says in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, after reading a tabloid-newspaper report of his putative 80-a-day cigarette habit, “I’m glad I’m not me.”

Whoever he is, Bob Dylan doesn’t role-play so much as play around with the very idea of roles. When Mr. Cott himself talked to Mr. Dylan about directing his first feature, Renaldo and Clara, he clarified its confused cast list thus: “There’s Renaldo … there’s a guy in whiteface singing on the stage, and then there’s Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is listed in the credits as playing Renaldo, yet Ronnie Hawkins is listed as playing Bob Dylan.” But Bob Dylan made the film, insisted Mr. Cott. “Bob Dylan didn’t make it,” replied Mr. Dylan in what one fervently hopes was the tone of mock exasperation he perfected for Mr. Pennebaker’s picture. “ I made it.” Not for nothing was Mr. Dylan’s last movie called Masked and Anonymous.

Because for all his modernity, for all his cubist narratives and symbolist imagery, Mr. Dylan has never had any time for the 20th century’s cult of the id. Whatever else he may be doing as an artist, he’s adamant that he isn’t expressing himself. “The songs are the star of the show,” the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn quotes him as saying, “not me.” Yes, but he wrote them didn’t he? Not necessarily. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song,” he said of what is probably still his most iconic work, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Only at the level of craftsmanship is he willing to discuss writing: “I’m not thinking about what I want to say,” he told Mr. Hilburn. “I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’“ Little wonder Mr. Dylan admits to loving “Don’t Fence Me In” and what he calls Cole Porter’s “fearless” rhyming.

NOT SO MICHAEL GRAY, WHOSE LOATHING of such “supposedly sophisticated songs” is as profound as his love of Bob Dylan. The author of a 918-page study of Mr. Dylan’s art, Song and Dance Man, Mr. Gray has now written the 736-page Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, a book of such critical mass it comes complete with a searchable CD-ROM transcript. Type in the word “Hoagy” and you will be taken to this: “Carmichael is one of the many improbable people whose work and persona Dylan admires, possibly just to be perverse.” Type in the word “Sinatra” and you will learn that “your parents listen[ed] to [his] awful, syrupy music on their radiogram” and that his “musical world was the one rock ’n’ roll was born to abolish.” Well, maybe, though should Mr. Gray have turned on his own radiogram these past few weeks he might have heard a new D.J. on XM Radio discoursing worshipfully on the likes of Sinatra, Judy Garland, Glenn Miller, even Dean Martin. The D.J. in question is none other than Bob Dylan.

A critic needn’t like everything, of course, but if he’s to cut deep he must range wide. Mr. Gray knows his blues and his rock ’n’ roll—but that’s about all. Just as you wouldn’t trust a writer on classical music who told you the only guy that counted was Beethoven, so it’s hard to trust Mr. Gray even at those times when he seems level-headed. When he’s off his head, caterwauling at another writer on Dylan he deems to have got things wrong, he sounds like the worst sort of bitchy academic. Mr. Gray, who studied English under F.R. Leavis (from whom he’s inherited his teleologizing tantrums and canonizing curmudgeonliness), knows everything there is to know about Bob Dylan apart from the answer to the question: What know they of Dylan who only Dylan know? “Too much of nothing,” as Bob Dylan once sang—and that “just makes a fella mean.”

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

Not long into the last century, Cicero McClure, a farmer in Western Pennsylvania, started a second job as a night watchman. After a hard day of plowing and tilling the fields, he would take himself off to the electric-power substation it was his nightly duty to guard. Before he began putting in these phenomenally long hours, McClure had been a director of a local community bank he'd also invested in. The bank folded during the great panic of 1907, and McClure took the night job so that he could repay the depositors who'd lost their money. The law didn't require this, but his sense of honor and pride did. And it is with honor and pride that William Greider relates Cicero's small but startling story in The Soul of Capitalism . McClure was Mr. Greider's great-uncle, and he stands as a kind of spiritual emblem of the book's main theme: He's capitalism's soul-a soul that has long since departed the body in question. Cicero's story, Mr. Greider writes, "would be unthinkable today-but [it] does suggest how much our system of personal values has been degraded by the conventions of modern capitalism."

Degraded, though not dismantled. Because the purpose of Mr. Greider's seductive, suggestive new book is to "sketch the outlines of a promising new story for our future-and to make it sound plausible for ordinary citizens, if not to their leaders." Capitalism is far from being all bad. For one thing, unlike most other political systems, it works. As Mr. Greider puts it: "The United States has solved the economic problem." Hunger and scarcity are no more. Americans and others fortunate enough to live in the most advanced nations inhabit a world of regal abundance. The only thing they're short of is time. On average, Americans work between 300 and 400 more hours a year than people in other leading industrial economies. In Europe, too, working hours are on the increase. All the money thus earned buys people products-pre-chopped vegetables, TV dinners-to make their non-working time more leisurely. Unfortunately, these goods give them none of the satisfaction that comes from preparing and cooking a proper meal.

John Maynard Keynes, in many ways the hero of Mr. Greider's book, predicted all this back in the 1930's. He saw capitalism as a great machine for freedom, but he saw too that capitalism's emphasis on the material, on the here and now, rendered it incapable of solving the big puzzles of life-the puzzles that confound you no matter how comfortable you are. Freedom, in other words, turns out to be another trap: What do you do with it once you've got it? We don't know. And so, divorced from the everyday contingencies of material reality and working for ever more aggressively managed companies, we grow more and more anxious about our lives. The world, we feel, is out of our control, and neither of the political parties is going to do anything to change it. Hence our retreat into the private, into those four-walled worlds which we can control-if only by spending more and more money on draping and decorating them.

All this may sound familiar to grad-school lefties, but The Soul of Capitalism is far from being a slab of Marxist rant. Though Mr. Greider wants to reinvent capitalism, he's insistent that the reinvention must be done "little by little, to make more space for life." Mr. Greider is a gradualist, not a utopian dreamer. Indeed, he says, it's the right-wing neoclassical economists with their Wild West fantasies of unbridled competition who are the real utopians-economists like Milton Friedman, who once said that as long as they stay within the law, corporate executives have no responsibility other than making money. As Mr. Greider points out, if we all lived by such a code, the result would be anarchy. And he loves his country too much for that: These days, he insists, talking critically about capitalism "may even be the patriotic thing to do."

To start with, then, we need to change the way we think about work. The master-slave relationship that still holds sway in the average office needs rethinking-not just because it's demeaning to the slave half of the equation, but because it allows the slaves to abnegate responsibility for their lives. Mr. Greider approvingly quotes Elaine Bernard of the Harvard trade-union program, who says: "Workplaces are factories of authoritarianism polluting our democracy. Citizens cannot spend eight hours a day obeying orders and being shut out of important decisions affecting them, and then be expected to engage in a robust, critical dialogue about the structure of our society." Nor can they be expected to engage in a critical dialogue about the best working practices at their places of employ. When two workers at an Alcoa mill recommended important money-saving changes to a visiting professor, he asked them how long they'd had these ideas. "Fifteen years." Why had they kept quiet so long? "Those sons of bitches never asked us before." The answer to such mulishness, Mr. Greider believes, is worker co-operatives. Not only are people happier in co-ops, but co-ops tend to promote thinking about the future rather than futures. Interested in conserving their community and ensuring there are jobs for their children, they play a longer game than monopoly capital has time for-a game in which everybody wins. At which point (and not for the last time), you find yourself thinking: Well, maybe .

Certainly, there's no gainsaying capitalism's tendency to see the future as no more than an arena of potential profit. Short-term gains take precedence over long-term good; chop down the rain forest today and you'll have tempests and floods tomorrow. Fortunately, Mr. Greider argues, capitalism lets us make our own weather. We might not realize it, but we are the major shareholders in the economy. Capitalism recently entered a new age, an age in which fiduciary institutions-our pension plans and trust funds-own more stock than the leading shareholders. Even very wealthy people are now dwarfed by the likes of you and me, because we can choose where to invest our money-and as right-thinking long-termers, we will choose to invest it with companies who share our aims for the future. Well, maybe.

As Mr. Greider is elsewhere at pains to point out, choice is one of capitalism's great chimeras. Though we're told this is the age of competition, it is in fact, says Mr. Greider, the age of the oligopoly. Fewer and fewer firms are chasing our money. The only reason companies want to grow these days is to swallow up or kill off the smaller, more innovative companies who are out to take them on. General Electric, for instance, used to be an innovator, but is now no more than "a diversified holding company that acquires companies already dominant in their sectors, then dumps them if they lose their commanding position …. The 'new' General Electric raises irresponsibility to a proud creed."

It's hard to disagree with this-and equally hard to believe that Mr. Greider's calls for broader ownership and co-ops can do much to change things. He's such an optimist that even an empty glass looks half-full to him. The Soul of Capitalism is the work of a man drunk on his (admittedly intoxicating) dreams. Alas, a bar is not the best place to get a grip on the world. Not once does the book countenance the thought that things might be the way they are because we are the way we are. "He that lives upon hope will die fasting," said Ben Franklin in The Way to Wealth . William Greider's book is a shaming, soiling, bruising read, but it will still leave level heads hungry for hope.

Christopher Bray is a commissioning editor at London's Daily Telegraph .