Dreamland can … be thought of as something of a compromise between thriller and political novel. Its main theme is the hero's reluctant discovery of some facts about his deceased father's personal and professional life, which are dug up in the course of a journalist's pursuit of a story. So the book is structurally a novel of mystery, moving towards exposure and explanation. There are, however, no corpses in the cellar. The exposed truths are mostly non-criminal acts of espionage and international diplomacy.

Another category which Dreamland fits into is the American novel of conspiracy, a new genre which has flourished in the 1960s and 1970s for reasons that need not be enumerated. In fact this is probably the more correct way to regard the component of mystery in Dreamland, for its clarifications and discoveries are ambiguous and incomplete in the way that the exposure of conspiracy has been...