Black President [Paperback]

Upon receiving this book for review, I found a handwritten note from the publisher in the sleeve, thanking me for selecting the book as the author had been turned down in the States!

I was hopeful then, that this was going to be a lost masterpiece, a book so unconventional, so daring, so polarising...and I was the lucky duck who got to see it early on. However - It dawned on me within the first quarter of the book that the reason it hasn't been published in the US is because it's absolute drivel.

Rick Schmidt has written his first novel with the air of sensationalism for sensationalist sake. He has blown up every unpalateable fact about America that we already know of, and added an extra layer of grime before putting his ideas down messily in print. The book seems to be written as a bunch of ideas loosely strung together. A collection of tired old conspiracy theories at best.

None of his characters are fleshed out enough to make them believable. Even the real life people (JFK, RFK, Hoover, Nixon, Monroe) all appear as lewd caricatures based on all the tabloid dirt that has surfaced over the years. It all just gives off a vibe of a kid poking a grizzly bear with a stick, looking to get a big reaction.

The title itself is very misleading. Most of the book is just an attack on any White House administration from George Washington onwards, and random bits of sniping at the FBI, CIA and the Mafia. I'm not naive enough to think that there is no politics behind the politics in the US, but the sheer venom the author harbours, and resorting to the sex scandal everytime to discredit his study, it gets old fast. Only in the last few pages does the promised 'Black President' card get played (by which time Schmidt has run out of steam and hardly seems bothered anymore). Given recent events, it looks like the author missed the boat completely on this one. Had he purported that Obama's line traced back through Kennedy he might have had a story (at least something to get his name on the National Enquirer), but this just looks tacky and sad.

Disappointing - but I'm sure we'll see the movie soon enough.

You can see why the publisher may have gone for this book - the promise of a story of a fictional first black president, ill-begotten son of JFK, elected president in 2012. Topical, controversial?

Sadly, it's an odd mix of tid-bits, a mixed up confusion of irrelevancies, based largely on fleshing out conspiracy theories in relation to a number of real-life events from 1961 to the present day. The balance of the book is odd - the story of the future black president and his family take up only half the book, with the rest a series of characters who either dot into and out of the story for no real purpose, or appear once and disappear. It's almost as if the author thinks he can add drama to his book by attacking historical figures. But there's nothing new in his spin on the usual conspiracy theories. And, in the end, the 20 years from 1992 to 2012 are wrapped up in a handful of pages. What's lost in the author's ambition to cover such a span of time is any depth - the characters he has created are stereotypes and their lack of substance means you ultimately couldn't care about them one way or the other.

In the end, this isn't really a novel; more a collection of semi-fictionalised real events spanning 50 years clumsily laid on top of a not terribly interesting story of a boy who grows up to be president.

Often, when reading a book, you find it so brilliant and wonderful you think 'this would make such a good film' and then, when the film is finally made and you go to see it, you find that the film is awful.

This book is the same thing in reverse. The book is awful, but it'll make a brilliant film.

I sort of wish I hadn't known from the books blurb that Schmidt is a film maker, because it colours my opinion of this book. When the characters are thin and not as fully developed as they are here, you can't help assuming that it was intended for the actor playing this part to add something of his own to the character. In a book, this obviously doesn't happen, and you're left with this lack of meat, a flimsy outline of the story that could have been. I've never read a screenplay or a film treatment, but this is how I imagine they come across. Strangly empty and lacking oomf and power.

A shame, this has a good story that should have made a good book, but it just doesn't quite get there.