Word: godey
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...being unbelievable. The story itself is plausible, if only barely; the right combination of pumps and levers probably could raise the Unknown Soldier's coffin, and in any case, part of the fun with the book is in finding out how it is done. That was the case with Godey's earlier The Taking of Pelham One Two Three--how in the world, the reader wants to know, could a group of men kidnap a subway car in New York...
...call Godey's latest book simply a work of fiction would be misleading. Although none of the major characters really exists, there are striking similarities between most of them and actual political figures. For example, Francis Rowan, the priest whose freedom Ken Booth seeks by stealing the Unknown Soldier, seems clearly patterned after religious activists of the '60s such as Daniel Berrigan and James Groppi--and in fact, Berrigan is compared to Rowan by name...
...Godey seems to be trying to make both his characters and their vague movement realistic. He almost succeeds, and despite the novel's wild premise the reader begins to take Booth and his compatriots seriously. One member of the group, Bruce Parmentier, joined the movement after several years as a lawyer. He began his career as a public prosecutor in a small New Jersey town, but quit the job when he found that he no longer wanted to jail the people he was prosecuting...
...figure, and The Talisman is not exception. Here, it is Emerson Albert Griese, first special assistant to the President. Griese is arrogant, ruthless, and considered the "power behind the throne" in the White House. And to make the connection between Griese and recent actual White House staffers even clearer, Godey writes that "Like Kissinger, he was foreign-born and had been drafted from the Harvard faculty for a high position in the new administration...
...John Godey has almost, but not quite, written a good thriller. The Talisman is more complex than it should be for easy, late night reading, and even the title, which somehow refers to the Unknown Soldier, is difficult to understand. But the book does not quite qualify as a serious novel, either. Godey is reaching for importance in describing the hopes and feeling of anti-war protesters stranded without a war to protest. In the end, however all his book achieves is sensationalism...