Books in Brief: Saving the Queen

Saving the Queen, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Doubleday, 248 pp., $7.95). Mr. Buckley’s first novel features an attractive hero (American, young, handsome, patriotic, sassy); an irresistible Queen (of England; never, in the novel, confused with the incumbent); a great crisis of state (American hydrogen bomb-development secrets are being leaked to Stalin); a super-secret mission (the hero has to find out who the leak is, the suspects having narrowed to the Prime Minister of England and the Queen of England); a dalliance with the Queen (she is described by the Washington Post reviewer: “If you will try to imagine a woman who looks like a young Grace Kelly, has the mischievousness of an Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the wit of an early Dorothy Parker, the sweetness of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and the breeding of, well, the Queen ‘of England, you will get the picture [of the fictional Queen Caroline, 31].”); a theatrical duel with the traitor (fought over the skies of England, the Queen and the military nobility innocently looking on); an ironic eulogy delivered at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (by the killer, in praise of the traitor); and, in an epilogue, the frustration of the Rockefeller Commission investigating the CIA (by the hero, invoking a privilege not enumerated in the Bill of Rights; a common law privilege, so to speak). Since the book’s appearance, the author has repeatedly been asked whether the novel is autobiographical. His answers have sometimes appeared evasive, although he readily admits to having served briefly as a deep cover agent in the CIA after leaving college. Asked if, like his hero, he was treated sadistically at a British public school, he has answered that no, while at school in England as a boy he was beloved, then as now, of everyone. Asked to reply to the charge that everyone in his novel speaks like himself, he has remarked that this is a weakness he has in common with Jane Austen. Criticized in the New York Times for a scene that “reads like the Hardy Boys at a brothel,” he replied that, speaking for himself, he would be delighted to read a chapter depicting the behavior of the Hardy Boys at a brothel. Asked why his hero, however amusing, departs so abruptly from the stereotype of Greene, Le Carré, et al., the author observed that not all American spies wear dirty underwear, or toss and turn at night wondering whether maybe Stalin wasn’t right after all. Asked whether he has in mind a plot for a future novel, he was— once again—evasive, admitting only that he had mused on the theme of a novel based on a great novelist who consumed his talent worrying about mundane affairs.