BOOKS

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL, by John le Carre (Knopf). Is there life after Karla? Last fall an omnibus volume, The Quest for Kar~ la, collected the three novels in which British spymaster George Smiley tracked his Russian adversary to a quiet, final face-off. Now Le Carre moves to a fresh battlefront, Israel versus Palestine, and subjects a romantic heroine to manhandling by the opposing sides. Charlie (for Charmian) is a bright, round-heeled, muddled-leftist actress recruited by Israeli agents in pursuit of a Palestinian terrorist. Her induction, briefing, and eventual ordeal are carried through in Le Carre's best manipulative fashion. As usual, we don't know what's going on for the first fifty pages; then we're flattered to find ourselves in a position of superior knowledge to Charlie and her London theatrical agent. When we get overconfident, we're administered little kicks in the back of the knees: Why are the Israeli agents, who came on like good guys, collecting Charlie's personal letters? Is she to be compromised, blackmailed, discarded?

After intensive training in how to turn her theatrical talents to faking Palestinian allegiance, Charlie is received into the Palestinian refugee camps. The novel shifts balance and deepens in feeling when she sees their misery firsthand. There is genuine suspense over which side we are to root for, and whether Charlie's several precarious identities will shatter entirely under a conflict of loyalties.

This is absolutely expert work—long-winded and suffocatingly detailed to start with, more than a little blackboardy in chalking the political issues, but with plenty of power when Le Carre floorboards his story to the end. It's his timeliest novel, and the appealing character of Charlie will probably make it his most popular.

WALTER CLEMONS

THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS, by Anthony Burgess (McGraw-Hill). In his new novel Anthony Burgess imitates not life but life's slickest imitator—television—and tells his story with three screens flickering simultaneously. On one, Sigmund Freud leaves Nazi-occupied Vienna by train for London and reminisces en route about a life spent grappling with his own neuroses and with a medical establishment reluctant to consider his theory of infantile sexuality. On a second screen, Lev Bronstein falls in love and thus loses favor with his fellow exiles in Trotsky's in Neiv York, a musical based on the revolutionary's American sojourn prior to his return to Russia in 1917. The third screen stars Valentine Brodie as a worldweary writer of science fiction who totters about a flood-ravaged Manhattan with his sidekick, Shakespearean actor manque Courtland Willett. Brodie's wife, meanwhile, is off in the heart of Kansas with other members of the scientific elite, preparing an exodus by spaceship in the hope of escaping the imminent destruction of Earth.

Themes and ideas cross from plot to plot, and, as happens too often when watching the set in the living room, the viewer is never quite allowed to escape the suspicion that somehow all the stories are really only one big story—as when Eddie Albert rides the Cannonball from Green Acres to Petticoat Junction or when Gomer Pyle comes whistling home to Mayberry.

The feel of television extends even to the jacket blurb, which Burgess, taking his cue from the self-promoting businessmen who pitch their own chickens and audio equipment, has written himself. But behind the glassy surface of Burgess's scenes lie a wit and intelligence that have continually eluded network programmers. The End of the World News is filled with clever wordplay and broad farce, coinages as bright as those of A Clockwork Orange, and humor as pointed as that of Earthly Powers, all fastened to a framework of rigorous humanism. Burgess subtitles his book "An Entertainment." Whatever he chooses to call it, he has managed to sidestep the recent British tendency toward spleen.

JOHN HOUSE

VERY MUCH A LADY, by Shana Alexander (Little, Brown). Other murders have had more grit, and many trials have delivered better plots and characters, yet for all the inauspiciousness of its details, the case of the Wasp headmistress and the Jewish heart (and diet) doctor may well become our contemporary version of An American Tragedy. Theodore Dreiser would have appreciated its claim on our attention, alert as he was to the confused workings of sex, class, and notoriety in the land. Especially class. That Americans are increasingly unable to talk about class only adds to its fascination for us and probably explains the persistence of Jean Harris's name in the headlines and the appearance of yet another book on her case.

Did she mean to shoot him? Shana Alexander offers a sympathetic and fairly convincing no to the question of intent. She may be right, but the issue of guilt has never been as compelling a mystery for Harris watchers as the vulpine charms of Dr. Tamower and the social intricacies of his and Harris's worlds. In her book on the matter, Diana Trilling uncovered Mrs. Harris's socially ambiguous past, her unsteady footing in the unsteady Wasp hierarchy of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Trilling also hinted that Tarnower's social maneuverings in New York's Westchester County might have been, but for his violent death, richer material for farce than tragedy. But this was only a beginning in the mining of the case, and, in any event, that book contained a few prejudices of its own.

So too with Shana Alexander's volume. Her good eye for the telling social detail clouds over from time to time, particularly in her observations of Westchester's wealthy Jews, which are delivered in an amused tone best described as goyisheh. Still, there are details aplenty here for a latter-day Dreiser should one ever come along. In particular they accumulate in an absorbing portrait of Tarnower, the vainglorious shtupper, the dispenser of social, if not socialized, medicine, the devotee of haut pastimes and low cuisine, the fellow who may have wished to, but did not, go gentile into that good night.

ELIZABETH POCHODA

THE WITNESS OF POETRY, by Czeslaw Milosz (Harvard University Press). Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz delivered these six lectures on poetry at Harvard University last winter. Among other things, they suggest that Milosz is a rather special emigre in our midst. We are not always so blessed by the Eastern European intellectuals who come to our shores; the tradition of the cold war scold has been strong among them. Literary refugees in particular have too often sought to establish themselves by chastising American poets for their selfinfatuation and despair. Milosz, who has lived here for two decades, has never gone in for that sort of thing, and this is especially admirable given his strong reservations about the usefulness of subjectivity in poetry. Instead, he has committed himself to a "passionate pursuit of the Real" in his poems, and elsewhere, as in these lectures, has engaged himself in its defense. Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasures of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.

"Ruins and Poetry," the finest lecture in the series, asks what poetry can be in this century and answers that it can be the witness of history, something as essential as bread and as fundamental as hope. Of course most poetry is nothing of the sort, as Milosz is well aware. What of its claim on our attention? Can it not be said to bear witness of another sort? Milosz has a generous mind as well as a Nobel Prize. He probably would not, despite his own prejudices, disagree with these lines from Robert Lowell: "Conscience incurable / convinces me I am not writing my life; / life never assures which part of ourself is life. " —E. P.

A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, by Isabella Bird, reprinted with a new introduction by Pat Barr (Virago). As a young woman Isabella Bird suffered from the "nervous debility" that plagued so many talented women in the nineteenth century. Her doctor thought that a trip might improve her health. He was right. She traveled for nearly fifty years and became the first female fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1873 she spent three months exploring the remote regions of the Rocky Mountains, which she described in letters to her sister. Published as a book in 1879, these keen and unaffected letters were an immediate success, and they are available now in a popular edition for the first time since 1912.

Isabella Bird has a lot to write home about: she rides a bronco into the gloomy wilderness, sleeps by the campfire in the company of men, kills rattlesnakes, herds cattle, and forms an intimate friendship with a shadowy, wildly handsome "dear desperado" who helps her climb, "uplifted above love and hate and storms of passion," to the icy pinnacle of Longs Peak. In 1879 this was considered "intoxicating" stuff; a generous dash of nostalgia makes it, if anything, an even headier brew today. It is impossible not to be charmed by Miss Bird's vivid impressions, recorded, she says, at the end of each day by the side of the fire, next to which she set her inkwell to keep the ink from freezing.

Isabella Bird is the ideal example of the female travel writer of the nineteenth century, and A Lady's Life is a major work in a minor tradition of books on America written by such Englishwomen as Harriet Martineau, Fanny Kemble, and Fanny Trollope. What impact it has lost as intelligence from an unfamiliar world, it has more than regained as a document of cultural history. Its themes are grand contrasts: civilization and nature, Europe and America, male and female. One must be careful, though, in assessing Isabella Bird's attitude toward her own sex: it is clear that the confidence with which she flouts convention springs directly from her belief that she is, especially in the most extreme circumstances, the very model of a Victorian lady.

DUNCAN STALKER

ANKER, by Dick Francis (G. P. Putnam's Sons). Not to worry—it's got the horses. In this new mystery, Dick Francis gives his loyal fans another perspective on horse racing via an engaging dolt of a narrator, Tim Ekaterin, junior member of a British family banking firm. Tim takes it into his head to back a horse—not at the track, but by investing in a great racer who has been bought for stud. It wouldn't be giving anything away to say that paranoia and drugs are introduced early on, and that the novel sports a slew of red herrings, a faith-healing vet, a nubile farmer's daughter, and a star-crossed romance that honorably and improbably resolves itself at the end.

Dick Francis is not a great stylist or a deep thinker, but he is a painfully honest writer. This emerges most tellingly— and adorably—in his utterly unconscious sexism: the narrator nobly wonders at one moment why so few women get into management and at the next refers to that "curvy redhead" in research. Francis was himself a jockey, as nearly everyone knows, and his loyalty to the institution of horse racing, like Tim Ekaterin's loyalty to the family bank, is reflected in his absolute conviction that it is individuals, not institutions, that fail. The dishonesty and greed that breed violence are always personal, never political; the process of sleuthing and policing that leads to the villain's downfall is not obscured by that haze of institutional corruption from which so many other detective writers draw breath and depth. But what Francis lacks in nuance he makes up for in exhilaration: he and his readers live in a world where nice guys finish first.

APRIL BERNARD