(Atlantic books, £22)
Even the title, White King and Red Queen, is a muddle: the "red" alludes to communism, of course, but why queen? Was there anything inherently feminine about the Soviet Union or its chess representatives? And what's the significance of "white king"? "White" is not an adjective customarily applied to the democratic west; when used in opposition to communist red, it references the anti-Bolshevik side in the Russian civil war. And who are these two mythical personages meant to represent? The cover photograph shows Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer facing off over a chessboard, but it's hard to see Fischer as a white king, and downright impossible to imagine Spassky as a red queen.
The muddle persists between the covers. The book is competently written and well researched, but it calls to mind Winston Churchill's famous admonition, "Take this pudding away. It has no theme."
The book does purport to have a theme, suggested by its subtitle: How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard. But the actual meaning of this phrase keeps shifting, and so the theme remains elusive. Is Johnson suggesting the cold war had an influence on the way international chess competition was organised after the second world war (it obviously did)? Or is he suggesting that the play itself was in some way a sublimation or symbol of the struggle, and that the leading chess personalities of the era reflected the political systems from which they sprang (a far more dubious proposition)? It was never clear to me which Johnson intended, and I'm not sure it was clear to him either.
?Either way, Johnson makes extravagant and ultimately unconvincing claims for the significance of the role played by the game of chess during the cold war. "Chess provided a mega-metaphor," he says and later in the same paragraph even tells us, "By providing the safety valve that kept the lid on the cold war, chess helped save civilisation from itself." Really?
There is no question the Soviets took the game seriously—Russia had long been a chess-playing country, and Lenin was an enthusiastic amateur who encouraged the game's development after the revolution—and in the postwar era, the USSR enjoyed and exploited the prestige attendant upon its competitive successes. No country in the west shared this level of passion, or accorded the game anything like comparable significance; until the early 1970s, serious chess in the democracies was restricted to a small circle of (usually maladjusted) adepts. As an ideological battleground, grandmaster competition was a tiny, barely relevant sideshow. During the decades before the advent of Bobby Fischer (pictured, below right, in his match against Spassky in 1972), I doubt most Americans and Britons would have been able to name the reigning world champion.
Finding the Soviet Union despicable is a perfectly sane response to that nation's ugly history, but when the evil empire becomes an obsession, one's judgement can be distorted, one's sense of proportion compromised. For Johnson, a leading neoconservative, the temptation is irresistible. For example, over the course of three long chapters—the book's centrepiece—he seeks to demonstrate that Bobby Fischer's victory in Reykjavik was a product of the superiority of liberal democracy, a vindication of unfettered intellectual inquiry. But it was nothing of the kind. Ultimately, regardless of how the two governments and the popular press chose to view matters, these were not two systems in conflict, these were two very idiosyncratic individuals sitting at a table playing a board game. The outcome suggested that when two geniuses compete, the greater genius will likely prevail. And that the contest will be interesting. And possibly that extraneous hoopla can do terrible things to one's concentration. But it did not prove one system superior to the other. If you doubt this, consider a fact that is, I think, beyond dispute: in 1972, there wasn't another western player besides Fischer who would have stood a chance against any of the top ten Soviet players.
In addition, Fischer was as poor an exemplar of western democracy as Spassky was of the Soviet system. The latter, although no political hero—Johnson chooses not to discuss Spassky's acquisitiveness, drinking and antisemitism—was almost as much a loner as Fischer, a covert dissident who dismissed all the party apparatchiks from his retinue during the pre-match training period (doing himself a serious disservice in the process, since they included some of Russia's greatest players). As long as he was world champion, he enjoyed a certain latitude. But the bill came due once the title was lost. Meanwhile, Fischer himself was no democratic Galahad. Vulgar, irrational, solipsistic, paranoid, he engaged in the sort of behaviour that, had it come from the Soviets, would have been roundly, and rightly, condemned in the west as unsportsmanlike, boorish and unethical. His breaches of etiquette were legion, and he easily broke as many rules and violated as many match conditions as the Soviets; most objective observers agree Spassky would have been justified had he demanded that Fischer forfeit the match before it began.
As history, this book is adequate if superficial (others have provided far more comprehensive accounts). Politics informs virtually every line, but the topic is addressed overtly only occasionally—and when that happens the ideological bias of the author does not, shall we say, conduce to judiciousness. There is a divagation concerning the high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews that I found disquieting; prejudice wears many hats, and the line between antisemitism and philosemitism can be narrow.
Finally, though, the book is guilty of the same flaw that mars writing from the Soviet time, about chess and so much else. It views the world through an ideological prism, and slots messy complexity into neat ideological categories. It isn't always wrong, but a lot of nuance gets trampled along the way.
