Malachi Martin is to the hidden, insider geopolitics of the Vatican and the papacy what Woodward and Bernstein are to the insider politics of Washington D.C.. Windswept House is a novel about power, faith, and love; and what Martin uncovers to the public view in his narrative is at least as explosive for Americans and the wide world as Watergate was for presidential politics in the United States.
Reviewers have said of his earlier bestselling novels, The Final Conclave and Vatican, that Malachi Martin's narratives are fiction in the same sense as The Winds of War and Dr. Zhivago are fiction. True to that assessment, Martin's Windswept House rings with unmistakable authenticity as his characters - powerful, high ranking prelates who control the sinews of the Church Universal; members of major humanist organizations; movers and shakers in the world of international affairs - shift into high gear for the final push to a new global order of peace and cooperation.
With their plans already well advanced, the only thing lacking for complete success is an effective global organization - a world-wide machine capable not only of acting as successor to the old, outmoded system of nation-states, but as successor to the so-called "contending regions" of the 1990s.
While there are plenty of candidates for that new and essential leadership role, none of them possesses the required universality, prestige or stability. In their inevitable struggle for predominance, in fact, a new warfare is rampant. It's the European Community (the EC, now expanding itself into the European Union, the EU) vs. the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). It's the United States and its newly constructed NAFTA vs. the EC and the Asian Tigers. It's the Asian Tigers yapping at the heels of the China Dragon. It's Russia struggling to keep its "Partnership for Peace" with the USA from foundering. It's everybody giving sterile lip service to an ineffective and failed United Nations.
In the opinion of some within those and other organizations, therefore, the answer to the urgent need for global administrative machinery is as obvious as it is achievable. With the ground well plowed during the long reigns of two Popes, the ideal moment has arrived to co-opt and secure the machinery of the Roman Catholic Church Universal as the most intricate and effective global administrative organization ever devised.
In the rarefied and privileged world of power politics driving the society of nations in the 1990s, success in securing just such an organization is of supremest importance. In that world, success is everything. Failure is not forgiven. But no one contemplates failure. No one doubts that the cooperative type of man required will emerge as victor - as the next Pope - from the Papal Conclave that will take place just as soon as the currently reigning and deeply embattled Pontiff is safely removed as the primary stumbling block standing at the gate of the 21st century.
"No spiritual journey is complete without a Vatican page-turner by Malachi Martin."
-Forbes Magazine
"It is to Martin's credit that his real-live 'fictional' Cardinals have flesh, bone and blood.
And sometimes the heart of a South Chicago ward heeler."
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Sacramento Bee
"One thinks of Upton Sinclair. One thinks of The Winds of War."
-The Washington Post Book World
"In biblical times they would have called him a prophet."
-The Dallas Morning News
"The patterns of alliances among cardinals that led to the unexpected [October] election of the Polish archbishop
were uncannily predicted in a novel called The Final Conclave by Malachi Martin."
-The Washington Post
