lint McClelland is more than he seems. A well-groomed, charming, but slightly disreputable itinerant street musician, Flint possesses a solid platinum flute worth $20,000, an instrument with which he can literally hypnotize an audience. And in his backpack are an odd assortment of castoffs, items that collectively represent the mosaic of a lost decade, the 1960s. These talismans have a strange effect on anyone who holds them, so long as the holder is old enough to have lived through that vanished decade. Each relic will evoke a surge of virtual experience in the holder, a flood of memories linked to the year the talisman represents.
Flint is missing a few years, but he claims that once he has assembled all 10 tokens, the long-delayed Age of Aquarius will dawn. All the bad vibes of the past two decades (this story takes place in 1988 and 1989) will vanish, and a hippie love buzz will reign. Flint has been convinced of this outcome by his sensei, a mysterious teacher known only as the Old Man, who tutored Flint in many disciplines, including flute playing and the martial arts. There's only one roadblock to this utopian quest: the Logician, a glamorous female opponent dedicated to keeping the world in soul-darkness.
In Portland, Ore., while picking up the copy of Life magazine that represents 1963, Flint encounters Edith "Eddie" Lincoln, a 40ish nurse just marking time in her life. Before he hits the road again, Flint reawakens her hopeful spirit with some tender lovemaking, leaving her behind as a kind of node in his network. Next, in Los Angeles, Flint falls in with biker Kyle Long. A hardened Viet vet, Kyle is working the wrong side of the law. When a deal goes bad—warped along deadly lines by the Logician—the biker is rescued by Flint, contributing his dog tags as the physical 1966. Flint sends Kyle north to join Eddie.
In Hawaii, Flint sniffs out Larry Dewitt, jaded Hollywood writer in possession of 1969. The Logician makes her first appearance in the gorgeous flesh, seeking to intercept the missing year, but is thwarted. Flint leaves Dewitt with contact info for Eddie and Kyle, and heads for Las Vegas. There, he ferrets out Grace Worthy, a high-rolling real-estate agent who was once a violent radical. She contributes 1968 to the mix. But at that point Flint's luck runs out, as he's captured by thugs of the Logician.
Brought to an insane asylum in Louisiana, a drugged Flint is subjected to various brainwashing strategems, including daily debriefings by the Logician herself. But he eventually manages to contrive an escape—at the same time that a certain quartet of friends arrives to bust him out. Reunited, the five questers need only to locate three more years to complete their magic. But will they succeed in the face of the Logician's mounting fury?
A period piece seeks a period of peace
Steve Perry, as one might suspect, is a Boomer himself, born in 1947. As such, like many of his generation, he holds the 1960s in high reverence. And in this fast-paced fantasy he manages to communicate some of the excitement of that brief interval in America's history. Without exaggerating either the good parts of the decade or the bad, Perry conveys, by the extensive flashbacks which his characters experience when handling the talismans, just what that multiplex period was all about. Additionally, Flint himself is a suitably deep character, compounded of certainty and doubt, of competence and wrong-headedness, so that he does not come off as a simpleminded hippie messiah bent on some improbable second coming, but rather as an average fellow of some talents whose natural drift to complacency has been interrupted by the eruption of magic into his life. Just like Eddie, Kyle, Larry and Grace, if the reader believes in this quest at all, it is due to the force of Flint's personality.
Each episode in this novel flows nicely. Perry has a gift for vivid description, suspense and slam-bang action. Drawing on his own martial-arts and weapons training, the author stages many convincing battles between the ragtag Zeitgeist warriors and the Logician's hired goons. (The Logician herself, however, her goals and backing, remain rather cipherish.) If anyone expects Perry to deliver a whimsical, airy-fairy tale influenced solely by Peter Beagle or Charles DeLint, say, they'll have to factor in the hard-nosed influence of Robert Heinlein. Perhaps Heinlein's Glory Road (1963) is a closer inspiration for this book. But although the individual episodes are nicely shaped, Perry structures his book a little oddly. An equal amount of time is devoted to parts one and two. The first section necessarily needs a lot of space, to set up the characters and concept. But the second part, Flint's long stay in the asylum, seems overlong, leaving only half as much space for the vital concluding third part.
But if there's one overpowering flaw in this book, it's the choice of period it's set in. Plainly, sadly, 1989 did not usher in a new Age of Aquarius. This foregone conclusion hovers over the entire tale. Only by setting the book in the present, with our future unknown, could this defect have been remedied. Why Perry chose not to is a mystery. One could speculate that this is a "trunk" novel, hauled out some time after composition and finally sold. But how hard would updating it to the present have been? That Perry chose not to ultimately hurts his otherwise strong tale.
