BY PHOEBE ADAMS
PÄR LAGERKVTST’S THE DEATH OF AHASUERUS (Random House, $3.75) has the bone-bare simplicity of action and the intricate proliferation of meanings characteristic of this author’s work. The time seems to be vaguely medieval, the place, somewhere on the pilgrim route to Jerusalem. The characters are the Wandering Jew and a handful of intermittently pious criminals that he falls in with at an inn. Mr. Lagerkvist’s theme is the relation between man, God, and the universe, and he contrives to say a number of dour things about it in the course of his astoundingly condensed tale.
In THE GREAT INVASION (CowardMcCann, $5.00), LEONARD COTTRELL attempts to reconstruct the long campaign by which Britain was converted into a Roman province. His materials are the inevitable Tacitus, Roman military records, and archaeological discoveries, some very recent. Despite the author’s ingenuity, the story tends to fall apart into fragments like the broken pottery beloved of diggers — each shard interesting in itself, but they don’t add up to a jug.
OH, MARY, THIS LONDON (Orion, $3.95) is a comic novel with the serious purpose of proving that young Britons today are a poor, timid lot compared with their elders. The author, MICHAEL CAMPBELL, has put forth this notion before, in Peter Perry, and this time he occasionally lets it get out of hand. Using as his mouthpiece and narrator a young Irishman hanging about London, Mr. Campbell denounces, with a good deal of merriment, English conversation, self-pity, pretension, immorality, beatniks, clothes, and girls. As long as the book sticks to active absurdities with crooks and cocktail parties, it makes its points amusingly and well. When the hero and his even more Irish roommate sit down and discuss the world, one can only yawn and echo D’Artagnan: Please, Aramis, let’s not theologize.
In 1837 Captain FREDERICK MARRYAT, the naval novelist, temporarily at outs with publishing and permanently so with his wife, made a trip to the United States. He intended to write the definitive account of the new nation and did not succeed, but the latest edition of A DIARY IN AMERICA (Knopf, $5.95), edited and abridged by Sydney Jackman, is nevertheless a very entertaining footnote to our history. Marryat was a roaring Tory who found the evils of republicanism in the oddest places. He was also a sensible, sometimes very shrewd observer, who detected, or foresaw, a number of quite genuine difficulties inherent in American society. Adaptable and sympathetic, he liked the energy, resourcefulness, and offhand good humor he encountered, enjoyed fireworks on the glorious Fourth, chuckled over the mad exaggerations of local humor, admired the women and the horses, and fell ecstatic victim to the mint julep, consoling himself by insisting that he had discovered the original recipe for this noble drink in Milton. He had a good ear, and is one of the few English visitors who have ever got the rhythm of American speech down correctly. The book’s opening scene, aboard the packet Quebec at Portsmouth, is pure Mark Twain, a rather startling phenomenon.
ANDRÉ MERCIEH, a French animal lover with considerable African experience behind him, has written a short book about his pet cheetah, OUR FRIEND YAMJJO (Rand McNally, $3.95). There are some prettily overcivilized pictures of Yambo, on a leash, accompanied by Madame Mercier in a leopard coat, and a few lively anecdotes of games, discipline, and broken china, but this is not one of the great animal books of all time. It lacks unexpectedness. Imagine the problems of keeping a spirited, welldisposed, seven-foot-long tomcat about the house, and you pretty well have the whole story.
Those of us who gave a quick vale to the scholarly severities of Winnie Ille Pu can recover a bit of dignity with FERDINANDUS TAUKUS (David McKay, $2.95), which is Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand the Bull put into Latin by ELIZABETH CHYMBERLAYNE HADAS.
It has the same delightful Robert Lawson illustrations and, praise the gods, a glossary.
GEOFFREY ASHE’S LAND TO THE WEST (Viking, $6.75) is a thoroughly charming excursion in pursuit of Saint Brendan the navigator, who, according to early Irish sources, set sail back in the Dark Ages and went somewhere to find something. Just where and what nobody has ever determined; indeed, there are wetblanket scholars who claim he never got beyond the Orkneys and lump all the western lands and southern islands with the saint’s tame whale, as whimsies of the Gaelic imagination. Mr. Ashe is too clever to defend Brendan directly, much less the whale. He sets out to demonstrate that an Irish scholar writing a life of Brendan before the Norse discovered America could have had access to information that enabled him to reinforce his pious fantasy with geographical and oceanic detail that is alarmingly accurate. The campaign leads all the way back to Bronze Age Crete, and forward through Plato’s Atlantis, Roman Britain, the early Irish church, the Vikings (very useful fellows for a historian trying to make connections across a watery waste), the Micmac Indians, and those aggravating rock structures in New Hampshire to, at last, the Aztec and Inca legends of bearded white gods from over the sea. Mr. Ashe cannot prove what he admits is improvable, but he obviously enjoys his eclectic rootings in the past and makes them read like an adventure story.
THE JUDGEMENT OF THE SEA (Regnery, $5.00) contains four novellas by GERTRUD VON LEFORT, well translated by Isabel and Florence McHugh. Baroness von LeFort is primarily a religious writer, even to some extent a mystic. Each of the stories concerns a spiritual crisis leading to an understanding and acceptance of divine will, but they are far from being quiet accounts of meditation and prayer, for the Baroness is very energetic with action and intrigue, and is addicted to some of the trappings of Gothic romance. Her work is slightly reminiscent of Isak Dinesen’s in its timeless, legendary tone, but it proves in the long run devoid of Dinesen’s haunting ambiguity. Karl Stern’s introduction offers, in addition to an admiring interpretation of Baroness von LeFort’s stories, some interesting opinions on the neglect of German authors by English readers.
THE SELECTED WORKS OF DJUNA BARNES (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $5.95) includes Spillway, The Antiphon, and Nightwood, a fair representation of Miss Barnes’s accomplishments in prose, poetry, and drama.