Richard North Patterson: Protect and defend

By JOHN CONNOR

Mary Ann Tierney, 15 years old, six months pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, discovers she is carrying a deformed foetus. If the pregnancy continues the child will probably die soon after birth and the caesarean procedure necessary to deliver it might leave Mary Ann infertile. She decides on an abortion.

Richard North Patterson, of Protect and Defend, has invented an Act of Congress. For a minor to have a legal abortion at least one parent must give consent. Mary Ann's staunch Catholic parents refuse their consent. Mary Ann's lawyer challenges the act.

Meanwhile, Democrat President Kerry Kilcannon has nominated the liberal Caroline Masters for Chief Judge of the Supreme Court. If she is appointed and the Tierney case goes to the Supreme Court there is a good chance the act will be declared unconstitutional.

Unfortunately for Kilcannon there is a Republican majority in the Senate, led by the ambitious and ultimately Faustian Macdonald Gage. Fearful of offending his Right to Life supporters, Gage is determined to stop Masters being appointed. Kilcannon is just as determined to see her succeed. Mary Ann's parents are determined to stop the abortion. Her lawyer is determined to fight all the way to the Supreme Court and Richard North Patterson is determined that his readers will enjoy every moment of Protect and Defend.

Throughout the novel there is doubt whether his characters will achieve their goals but none that Patterson will achieve his. This big, 550-page novel is superbly constructed and written showing a detailed knowledge of the wonderfully complex world of the US legal and political systems.

It is obvious that Patterson is opposed to the Right to Life position but Protect and Defend never harangues the reader. Mary Ann's parents, for instance, are portrayed as principled and loving people devastated by the consequences of the stand they feel they must take. Only the dishonest manipulators on both sides are portrayed as the dangerous fanatics they are.

The novel relies for its power on the passions roused by a contentious issue but it is no polemic. Instead it explores, with often disconcerting sensitivity and honesty, how laws based on rigid ideology affect the lives of ordinary and not so ordinary people.

Random House

$34.95

* John Connor is an Auckland writer and lecturer.