Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1990 TAG: 9003042265
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"The GOD Project" is a political thriller that's as good as the best. Like Richard Condon's "The Manchurian Candidate," it projects current governmental reality into a nightmarish vision of the near future.
The plot is a wild, mysterious mix of elements including (but not limited to) Christian evangelism, artificial intelligence, sex and conspiracies. The characters are vivid and believable. Author Stan Lee's prose is as smooth, readable and funny as it was in his fine first novel, "Dunn's Conundrum."
The protagonist is Malcolm Keyes. At the beginning of the novel, he's an ad man. He works on the campaign of Richard "Doc" Halliday and, when everyone else is gloomily looking at defeat on election night, Malcolm reads the same partial vote counts and predicts victory. Halliday and his vice-president, Madeleine Smith, manage to win by the smallest of margins when they carry Hawaii. On that same night, Halliday learns of Keyes' unique talent.
He has a virtually perfect eidetic memory. Any document he reads, any conversation he hears, Keyes remembers. He's a living tape recorder. And he's the perfect White House aide to investigate the GOD project.
It's a weapons system, or something, that is so secret Halliday himself can't find out what it is. He learns early on that the CIA is somehow involved. But what does the GOD project have to do with the agency's interest in specific physical measurements of an unrelated group of men, as recorded in something called The Book of Mark? And what is going on at the huge laboratory in a remote, desolate part of the Colorado Rockies? What's the role of a group called the Consortium?
Lee answers all those questions, of course. He meets the demands of the genre by maintaining suspense all the way through and coming up with a reasonably spooky solution to his riddles. But that's not really enough for this kind of novel. The best ones show us more. "The Manchurian Candidate" was a brilliant skewering of McCarthyism. "The God Project" deflates Reaganism.
Lee takes an unapologetic liberal point of view and cuts loose with both barrels: "Think of a drunken blind man flailing around in a dynamite factory trying to light a wet cigar. That's the right wing in America." "The Bill of Rights . . . [made] it difficult to fool the public. The big rich have been walking on eggs ever since [it was passed], terrified that the secret would get out . . . That in a country where we have one person, one vote, everything is run for the benefit of the big rich. And that isn't easy to hide.
"Seventeen industrialized nations had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. Only two industrial countries didn't have a universal health care system: South Africa and the U.S. The Pentagon was relentlessly burning down forests all over the U.S. and then measuring sunlight, trying to prove that nuclear winter wouldn't happen . . . At the same time there were over 140,000 bridges in America that were structurally deficient. Water supply systems were deteriorating. While black men were only 6 percent of the population, they were 50 percent of male prisoners in all the lockups of the country. The country seemed to be madly tossing its wealth away pursuing nuclear superiority while everything else was going to pot."
That's the political sensibility that informs the novel, but don't be put off by it. Lee never lets his polemics get in the way of his story. "The GOD Project" is a keeper.
by CNB