Enlightening ... Nuanced ... Garber is confident that literature continues to lie in wait for demagogues and authoritarians ... Much as I admire this sentiment, I also fear that it arises from nostalgia for a culture that, however divided it may have been in other ways, held literature in common as a source of value and an object of reverence.
Garber’s book offers reason to think that the decline of reading and the rise of authoritarianism are twinned forms of disempowerment ... Garber’s mode of argument is analogical and evocative rather than causal; her well-trained ear is cocked to detect Shakespearean allusion in a political milieu filled with denunciations, self-mythologizing speeches, and vertiginous twists of fate ... Has a touch of scholarly obsessiveness ... Garber conjures a vanished world in which politicians and TV journalists knew the playwright’s work, could quote him, and appealed to him as an authority ... The great pleasure of A Treacherous Secret Agent lies in its faith that literature gets the last word.
Garber makes the broad claim that literature 'will always undermine power with truth' and that it played the role of 'a treacherous secret agent' during the Red Scare. She likens those years to the current state of repression, censorship, and assault on freedoms, reminding us that literary voices still have potent force. A new light on dark times.
