Written in the form of a semi-documentary novel, with snippets of broadcasts, speeches and extracts of other books thrown, this is an increasingly less funny novel than when it was first published 20 years ago. Mr Ferguson writes about a charming demagogue who rises meteorically through Australian politics using the mistrust of those about him to fuel his success. It’s glib, overly clever (I suspect that one character was only given her name in order for a pun in the climax) and tries very hard to be a fable in the vein of Candide, but it kept me reading all the way through in one session. In today’s world, where demagogues and their followers are increasingly common, the plausibility of this only falters in the fact that Luther Langbene is a genuinely competent human being who manages to find himself in a spotlight that many a minority party politician has found themselves in but failed to exploit as capably as him.