Going Home - Dennis Frank Macek

Do recollections from a past life animate a person in the present?  If they do, what does that mean about our lives?  About us?  This novel is a political thriller set in the present.  Meanwhile the central character remembers fighting in the Greek war against Troy during the Bronze Age.

Post-Obama’s interregnum, Dan Hacek, retired small-business owner and well married to a physician, forms a boutique political party in Reno, Nevada, and calls it the Conservative-Reform Party.  To amplify the party’s platform Dan is persuaded to stand as the party’s candidate for President of the United States.  He gets traction from the cogent platform—arrest global-climate change and brake runaway U. S. government spending—and he is passionate about it. 

Collaterally Dan is beset by increasingly frequent and vivid memories—they can’t be dreams—of commanding Agamemnon’s chariot corps in the Mycenaean Greek expedition against the citadel of Troy.  As recalled by Dan, skirmishes are lethal, nights breed extinction.  The Cause is hopeless.  Finally Amphilochus—Dan—counsels his king to use guile and gold to slip Greek horsemen inside the walls of Ilios (Troy).  At this they succeed famously.

The stories—which mirror each other, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes subliminally—meld by the end of the novel.

At base the novel is about fulfilling human existence—why and how.  Why take on the U. S. political establishment?  Why take on the mighty Hittite empire at Troy?  Beyond having to breathe, why do anything?  Going Home shows how we find answers.