Books: The Rivals

• Share

SAVING THE QUEEN

by WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

248 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

THE EDGE

by JOHN V. LINDSAY

236 pages. Norton. $7.95.

A moral can be found in these two fledgling fictions by public figures: aspiring novelists should try to avoid becoming mayor of New York. William F. Buckley Jr. was lucky. He lost his 1965 campaign and has since had plenty of time to tend to his twitting—in articles, books of nonfiction, the National Review and on TV's Firing Line. John V. Lindsay was not so fortunate. He not only won first prize in 1965 (four years as mayor) but, as things turned out, second prize (four more years). Because of Lindsay's self-evident weariness, this battle of the books between old antagonists is a decided mismatch.

Not that either one poses much of a threat to Norman Mailer (yet another mayoral ex-candidate). Buckley's spy thriller is set in the early '50s, when Stalin was in the Kremlin, Joe McCarthy was "going after the fags" in the State Department and all was right with the cold war. Blackford Oakes, Yale '51, is pipelined by the old-boy network straight into the CIA. His assignment proves crucial to the survival of the West. Someone close to England's Queen Caroline is leaking American H-bomb secrets to the reds. With nary a false step, Oakes foils this villainous plot and gets as close to the Queen as is possible for a robust young conservative.

Buckley, Yale '50, is clearly half kidding. But the half that is not causes some problems. No discernible irony or worry leaven his political message—free world ends justify the means—or his fulsome adulation of the "beautiful" Oakes, "the man-boy American, loose, bright, shining with desire and desirability." At times like these, not even Buckley's wittiest sesquipedalian sonorities can allay the impression that he is writing with his foot in his cheek.

Lindsay's prose, by comparison, seems set down by the numbers: "Mayor James Carr sat heavily in his big leather chair behind his littered desk in the handsome office in downtown San Marco." If Buckley has written Frank Merriwell Joins the CIA, Lindsay's lumbering parable could be subtitled Seven Years in May. The time is the not too distant future. Runaway unemployment and racial strife have brought about two years of martial law in America. Before Congress is a "Special Powers" bill that will eliminate virtually all civil liberties. "There may be," a Justice Department official concedes, "a minor constitutional question about it . . ."