Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT is all but finished, and Ken Booth knows it. Vietnam, the draft, the '60s--they seem to have been forgotten. When Booth, the central figure in John Godey's novel The Talisman, and a few others who have stayed with the movement demonstrate at the White House, not even the FBI shows up to take their photographs. So Booth searches for another way to reach the public, another way for the movement to get the attention it needs. He decides they will steal the remains of the Unknown Soldier of World War II, as ransom...
...Talisman is a suspense novel that tries to be political, but ends up 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...
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...
...NOVEL ABOUT CHARACTERS like Parmentier and Booth could examine just what it was that made some people leave society for "the movement," or for any movement, in the '60s. But The Talisman is not that novel, and most of the other people in the book are merely caricatures of stock political figures. The President seems to be mostly concerned with his makeup looking right on television, when, after the Unknown Soldier is taken from Arlington Cemetery, he will announce whether Francis Rowan will be freed or not. His news secretary is a nearly imcompetent former newspaperman who once worked...
...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...