John Gardner

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The Last Trump

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[The Last Trump is set in] the mid-1990s, and Russia has conquered Europe, with Britain (rotted with leftists from within) surrendering to a Soviet "peace-keeping force" and the US "neutralized" by having its intelligence apparatus totally sabotaged. There's only one hope to avoid nuclear holocaust (China's ready to decimate the whole western world): Operation Golgotha, a plan created back in the 1970s that involves missiles already secreted throughout Europe (aimed at the USSR), with details of the plan divided up and hypnotically implanted in the minds of assorted undercover British agents (a novelist, a theater director, etc.). So the US Prez (Ted Kennedy, apparently) activates Golgotha by sneaking US-based British agent Paul Fadden back into England, complete with the code-sentence that will unlock the Golgotha info from these hypnotized agents, whom he must identify and track down one by one…. Nonsensical pseudo-Buchanesque folderol, of course—not helped much by cutesy 1990s touches (Bernstein's Eighth Symphony is played, Dame V. Redgrave hobbles by on a cane) or lots of lazy, clichéd prose. But Gardner … is always an agreeably straightforward storyteller, confident and professional enough to squeak by with even so foolish a concoction as this one.

A review of "The Last Trump," in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. XLVIII, No. 17, September 1, 1980, p. 1176.

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