Skip to main content
The American Spectator
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBEHOME

Click here to read the full text of this article in the American Spectator Digital Archive

Saving the Queen

Mathews, Judy

Book Review/Judy Mathews The Spy Who Came in from Camp Blakey • Saving the Queen is a spy novel involving young Blackford Oakes who, like the author, William F. Buckley, Jr., is educated briefly...

...Pensaud's house of prostituSaving the Queen by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Though his lips were normally set, he was quick to smile, a charming and precocious smile, somehow wise and amused, and he smiled when the waitress, varying very little from the basic gambit of the truck driver, said there were excess potatoes, that a dumb cook had prepared too many...
...Call or write: The Shore Line Company Post Office Box 553 Bloomington, IN 47401 (812) 334-2761 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 37...
...the button is over there right behind the President...
...Baron Von Kannon Dale Vree If your campus, club, business, social, or civic group could use a good speaker, we can find one appropriate for you...
...Book Review/Judy Mathews The Spy Who Came in from Camp Blakey • Saving the Queen is a spy novel involving young Blackford Oakes who, like the author, William F. Buckley, Jr., is educated briefly in England, graduates from Yale, and becomes a CIA deep-cover agent in London...
...I shall not spoil the novel by revealing its outcome...
...When it is over, the headmaster and wielder of the whip says as proof of his anti-American-ism, "Courtesy of Great Britain, sir...
...One cannot disassociate him from his work...
...The reader deserves to have as much fun with it as did the author...
...But after eating only a few, suddenly his stomach was narcotized by his mind's return to the letter, and he walked quickly to the men's room and wept silently in the toilet compartment, wedging his weight against thedoor because there was no lock...
...Blackford Oakes is William Buckley not only in appearance and sense of humor, but even in manners and concern for others—qualities not usually found in our public figures, yet qualities for which Buckley is renowned...
...Blackford Oakes' subtle humor is Buckley at his most puckish, as when, at a White House dinner, he tells the wife of the president of General Motors (whom he calls Mrs...
...At 5'7" and 120 pounds he was growing fast, but not in those mutant leaps and bounds that leave the mid-adolescent looking like a gazelle...
...What makes the reader uncomfortable is that it is Buckley who is saying them...
...The discussion between the two men occurs in the air over the radios of their two competing fighter planes which they are demonstrating before an audience which includes the Queen...
...The two most impressive scenes in the book have, however, little to do with sex...
...As punishment for drawing an obscene caricature of his_ Latin master on the blackboard (and for simple American insolence), Oakes receives nine lashes...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Dr...
...James A. Meigis Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The other great scene is the final one in which Blackford has discovered whothe British traitor is...
...The first is the episode at Greyburn, the British public school Oakes attends for a few months...
...Wilson dive for her husband and point toward the curtain behind the dais...
...In these scenes Oakes represents the irrepressible American spirit, intelligent and witty, and yet undaunted by British authority...
...Apparently aware of this condition—a condition that would flaw another book—the author turns it to delightful advantage as when his narrative impishly mentions God and Man at Yale, and his friend, James Burnham...
...He must then either convince him to commit suicide, or he must kill both the traitor and himself in what appears to be an accidental plane crash...
...In fact...
...The description of the torture is vivid and painful...
...Chase's words and vows to get even someday...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and .the mind's wheels turning...
...Oakes remembers Dr...
...Only a grouser will complain and only Garry Wills and the New York Review of Books will prowl the text for evidence of worldwide conspiracy...
...Blackford] arrived in the late afternoon, the beneficiary of random highway philanthropies including a plate of french-fried potatoes from the Howard Johnson waitress who, when he had sat down after his driver dropped him to go north to Hartford, and asked, at the counter, for a glass of water, said he was cute, which, suddenly, he realized self-consciously, he probably was, wearing trim white shorts, and a T-shirt marked CAMP BLAKEY, and white socks and tennis shoes, a rope belt and a watch with an Indian head band he had sewn himself...
...Upon receiving word from his mother that his parents have separated, 15-year-old Blackford Oakes hitchhikes from camp to his aunt's house in New York...
...His hair was a dark blond, with the same yellow-white strains that even now came out on the least touch of the sun...
...It is not that they are terribly kinky or that they are contrived...
...His mission is to discover who near Queen Caroline of England is leaking hydrogen bomb secrets to the Soviets...
...The hero looks like Buckley and even quotes Latin phrases with the same gusto and fluency, and it is, therefore, impossible ever to forget the author's presence...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...Buckley is having fun and so will most readers, even though the fun is never had at the expense of the serious issues which hover about the narrative...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Doubleday $7.95 tion, are embarrassing...
...His eventual success is memorable...
...Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...It is suspenseful and dramatic...
...When he regained control, he left through the back way, and resumed hitchhiking, out of sight of the waitress, whose generous impulse he could not trust himself to acknowledge without betraying himself, or embarrassing her...
...Motors) that President Truman has designed Operation Down Under, " ' the mechanism that sinks the whole of central Washington underground, under an atomic-proof carapace...
...Her husband listened, spoke a single word, looked in disgust over at Black, shook his head, and escorted his wife to safety...
...Obviously the author does not stand very far removed from his novel...
...Because Buckley is so inextricable from his novel, the sex scenes, particularly the one at Mme...
...As they got up, Blackford saw Mrs...

Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8


Copyright ©2004, American Spectator. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized redistribution is prohibited.
 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.