Demonising the 'other'

In 1941, Charles Lindbergh delivered his "Who Are the War Agitators?" speech in Des Moines. He named the "Jewish race" as a group that was, "for reasons which are not American", pushing for US involvement in World War II. "We cannot allow," Lindbergh told a cheering crowd, "the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."

Though he didn't know it then, Lindbergh's star had already risen as high as it would go. His popularity as a dashing aviator and the sympathy generated by the kidnapping and murder of his child had taken him into the higher echelons of American society and politics.

But his anti-Semitism and belief in white supremacy had already attracted criticism. In a notorious statement, he characterised aviation as a "scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe "" one of those priceless possessions which permit the white race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown".

By 1942, Lindbergh's brief attempt to join politics had been stymied, not least because of the strong disapproval among Americans of his pre-war politics, his fascist sympathies.

It took a novelist of Philip Roth's stature to ask the "What if?" question "" what if Lindbergh had run against President Roosevelt and won, what if he had carried the taint of his personal beliefs into the White House?

The Plot Against America derives its power from the way in which Roth constructs not an alternate history but an utterly convincing memoir. It is true in every detail bar one: the events it speaks of never happened.

The Lindbergh years and the slow but inevitable persecution of America's Jews are recalled from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy called Philip Roth. Young Philip sees himself as an American boy born to American parents, growing up in an American city: his homeland is not in any Holy Land abroad, but unassailably in the United States of America.

As Lindbergh takes office, it is the Roths' belief that they are Americans who happen to be Jews that is destroyed, to be replaced by the cold logic of insiders and outsiders "" they are merely Jews who happen to be allowed, with great fortitude, in America.

The style slips between the staccato rendering of facts typical of shellshock survivors, and the strongly emotional voice of an adult remembering with undiminished pain and fear a childhood filled with more than its ordinary share of terrors.

The slow descent into terror begins with racist taunts as the Roth family tours Washington, whose American dream is really a nightmare in progress.

The Lindbergh government passes acts with reassuring names "" the Just Folks program, so reminiscent of the Patriot Act of today's US; the newspaper columnist, Walter Winchell, who emerges as a focal point for Jewish rights, is shot dead; there are riots (tame by Indian standards, terrifying in American terms).

As the US moves inexorably towards an Age of Kristallnachts, Philip Roth falters, unable to conjure up the nightmare vision of Dachau in Iowa as he allows the balance of history to reassert itself.

The vanishing of Lindbergh's plane in mid-flight is revealed to be the centre of a dark conspiracy masterminded from Germany. The "perpetual fear" that has hung over the Roth family and America's Jews in the Lindbergh era shows signs of lifting, but there are no victors, only survivors; everyone is damaged.

What makes the book work is Roth's willingness to search until he finds just the right detail, to marry historical fact with the claims of fiction seamlessly. Could Lindbergh have become president?

And if he had, could he have actually perverted the nation's conscience to the point where he turned the "chosen people" into objects of derision, of vengeful myth-making, where he could have made the dreaded camps of Dachau happen "here", in the land of the free? It doesn't take Roth much effort to erect the scaffold of the possible on the bones of the actual past.

Roth has said The Plot Against America isn't intended to be read as a veiled attack on the Bush administration. But his novel is a clinical illustration of how it is possible to fool most of the people all of the time, to find collaborators, to convince the world that you are fighting a war against terror.

In The Plot Against America, the targets of hatred are internal; in the real world, the "terrorists" that Bush, facing an election, hates so much are to be found anywhere in the landscape of paranoia.

Roth's perplexing decision to use his own self "" at least, his own name "" as the narrator is really what makes this novel come alive. Young Philip Roth is a version at least of the author's younger self, a doppelganger whose remembered history may be the alternate version, but remains authentic history all the same.

The line between novelist and character, creator and creation, is inexorably blurred here. This is the voice of an adult slipping back into a childhood so tainted that even his prized philately collection is defiled in his dreams by black swastikas printed across each stamp.

As Roth describes the gradual dwindling of his father's courage, in a land where he is now "only a Jew", his mother's struggle to retain some semblance of normality, he also describes a family torn apart by the politics of discrimination.

One foster-brother returns bitter after fighting in a war for a country that no longer has a place for him. The young Philip's "real" brother becomes a collaborator, convinced that the Jews have no way out of their backwardness except to assimilate, to become more like the "mainstream" Christians.

In places like America, this novel will be read as an attempt, possibly flawed, at alternate history, or an allegory on contemporary politics with a different set of demons.

In countries like India, you would have to have excised imagination out of your life not to see the parallels, not to wince in recognition at the ease with which any community or race can be demonised and forced into concentration camps of the mind.

Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape
Price: £16.99
Pages: 391

The Plot Against America