Books: Point of Disorder

PRESERVE AND PROTECT by Allen Drury. 394 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Taking on an Allen Drury political melodrama is like harpooning a blimp at three feet. It is not only impossible to miss, but every thrust is likely to be fatal. To begin with, there is the dreary genre itself—a peek-into-the-future theme that titillates with dark allusions to the present. Then there are Drury’s characters, a confusion of ideological wind-up toys carelessly slapped down to accommodate the easily distracted. There are the plots that are not plots but crisis situations on “which each character is obliged to comment, regardless of the triviality of his contribution. Above all, Drury writes the most impenetrable prose this side of a Japanese motorcycle manual rendered in English: “They all laughed, somewhat ruefully, but dauntless still; not noticing the flurry and excitement and sudden bustling all about that in the jostling, police-held crowd pressed up against the fence behind them, one other, gifted by a sometimes puzzling Almighty with the gift to change the world, laughed too.”

In Preserve and Protect, the fourth .novel in the series that began with Advise and Consent, Drury exploits the current climate of violence that presages what he calls “the Savage Seventies.” His U.S. is still involved in fighting bad guys at home and Communism abroad. There is a back-burner struggle in Panama, where a plot is stewing to steal the canal. At the same time, America is escalating a hot war to protect its interests in an independent African territory called Gorotoland.

Dreadful Thing. The U.S. is thoroughly divided over the war, and there are demonstrations and civil disorders in the streets. The struggle is intensified when the President, recently nominated to run for another term, dies in the mysterious crash of Air Force One.

After pages of superfluous background, oversimplified opinion and bloodshed (including murder by laser), the party in power reconvenes its convention and chooses a hard-liner as its presidential candidate. Drury concludes the book with a “dreadful thing” that occurs on the rostrum as the candidate receives the party’s acclaim. Suddenly, everyone is slipping around in blood. What happened to whom, how and why are questions that the author undoubtedly plans to answer in his next book. But after Preserve and Protect, the really important question is: When will Drury cease and desist?