Paul William Roberts, the popular literary journalist best known for A War Against Truth, his searing indictment of the war in Iraq, last tried his hand at fiction in 1994. Early news had it that this new novel would project Roberts’ informed and passionate views on American foreign policy into a future that confirmed our worst fears.

Something was lost along the way, though. The novel (in first-person, these-were-my-days flashback) now focuses exclusively on the ever-ascending career of David Leverett. Born to privilege and bred for government service, he joins the U.S. administration directly from Harvard as a foreign policy apparatchik and serves from Carter to Bush II.

The novel is about a long arc of contagion. Over his quarter-century career, Leverett, the prototypical decent conservative, is inexorably co-opted by his closest counterparts, the ideological conservatives. Leverett is propelled along by a greater story, that of the military industrial complex. Born after the Second World War, raised by the Cold War, its present apotheosis is shrilly amplified by the current administration’s unholy alloy of ideology and greed. It consumes the American perspective.

Unfortunately, Homeland does not bring these important issues into a workable fiction. The book is slow, confused, and overwrought. The narrative crawls forward between interminable policy papers and characters giving windy exposition. The occasional bon mots are overwhelmed by treacly metaphor: “a rich dank musky odor, the fecundity and abundance of nature’s hidden womb.” And God help us if real-world policy wonks are having tête-à-têtes similar to those portrayed in the novel, discussing issues last overheard in a second-year poli-sci tutorial. “We’ve got a lot of nerve telling other nations how to behave,” pouts Leverett at one point.

The near-future world does finally make an appearance, however briefly, bolted haphazardly on the end. But it’s too little, too late. Sadly, it’s Roberts’ own informed facility that got lost along the way.