Conspiracy thrillers typically occupy the sinister, occasionally apocalyptic, spaces of the human mind. Jackie Richards’ self-billed political mystery offers a different kind of scheme, one as quaint as the romance of a workers’ revolution, only more twee: a bourgeois escapist fantasy rooted in a widely-shared frustration with the stalemated two-party system.
[img]1109|left|||no_popup[/img] The novel begins with Cassie Danforth, a rising star in the news firmament, fulfilling her father’s dying wish to take over the family newspaper. Her hometown return to charming Clayton Landing, a fictional town in North Carolina, brings her into contact with a thriller’s usual riff-raff: a mysterious and handsome stranger bearing secrets, a hidden family legacy, powerful forces promising to realign Cassie’s worldview, and a gradually unveiled destiny. To Ms. Richards’ credit, the crisply-written yarn is a brisk, entertaining read with likeable characters despite the toothless conflict and lack of heart-stopping narrative obstacles — it’s amazing how plans in the story go according to plan. Although she throws in a light murder mystery in which suspects only slightly more menacing than Yosemite Sam but certainly more depraved, are dangled in front of readers from the get-go, it falls to anticipating her novel’s proposed solution to political gridlock to keep the pages turning.
Wishful thinking, however, is not an appealing response to the crisis afflicting the U.S. body politic. One can only be thankful that Ms. Richards did not entirely follow the Ayn Rand method of manipulating characters and events to offer a contrived rhetorical package masquerading as reasoned philosophy. Unlike Rand, whose sophistry is a triumph of amoral selfishness above enlightened self-interest, Richards merely yields to old-fashioned utopian tendencies, and the novel tries to inject idealism, integrity and cooperation into a political landscape rife with cynicism.
As embodied in a group whose name rivals the Majestic 12 in terms of pure panache — Pinnacle Seven — the plot at the heart of the book is premised on the formation of a credible third party to shatter two-party complacency and restore integrity to the political process.
Unfortunately, the idea behind Pinnacle Seven is an elitist one no matter how much the characters wring their hands about it. It’s akin to economic stimulus by Reaganomically giving the rich more money and power, trusting them to bring the rest of us peasants along for the ride. By leaving out the poor, the disenfranchised, the workers, the Pinnacle Seven concept skews to Platonian notions of philosopher-kings, reducing the people to mere voters whose main role in a new American politics is marking ballots for these newly-illuminated candidates. Of course, a smart-aleck could ask exactly how these elected elites are to resist the corrupting influences of power and preserve their benevolent governance. Without spoiling the novel’s solution to that pesky problem called the human condition, here’s an analogy: Send coal miners for periodic manicures to keep their hands nice and soft.
The novel’s shortcoming is fundamentally an analytical one in which the complex structural problems inherent in U.S. politics are bound up together in an act of equivocation, then confronted with rosy, wide-eyed optimism. With human behaviour emerging from a context of social and environmental context in addition to individual psychological factors, a pragmatic, realistic solution to our political problems eludes the Pinnacle Seven. Consider that even communism would work if it were simply a matter of rooting out the corrupt and empowering the honest. Nevertheless, the book’s positive outlook does offer a refreshing counterpoint to the doom and gloom. The answer may not persuade except in the general feeling that both Republicans and Democrats should feel the hard kick of the voters’ boot, but the question is certainly worth asking. In the asking, Ms. Richards certainly succeeds.
The Pinnacle Seven, by Jackie Richards. Available at www.amazon.com and www.iuniverse.com. Visit www.jackierichardsauthor.com for more information about the author.
Mr. Sisa is Assistant Editor of www.thefrontpageonline.com
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