Mixed Fiction

BANNER IN THE SKY by Jomes Ramsey Ullman (252 pp.; Lippincott; $2.75) tells how boy loves mountain, boy conquers mountain. Rudi Matt, 16, dreams of climbing the local peak known as the Citadel. Papa, who was a great Swiss guide, tried it and perished, so Mamma wants to keep her son grounded, but the boy has alpenstocks in his blood. By the bottom of the first page, he has played hooky from his dishwashing job and is off clambering from rock to rock. Seventeen pages later, he has rescued the famous English climber, Captain Winter, and even Rudi's Uncle Franz must admit this is an auspicious beginning; in his 20 years as a professional guide, Franz grumbles, "for me, there has never been a rich Englishman waiting in a crevasse." Before the reader can say "Gruess Gott!" the three of them are belaying their way toward the summit, along with a tepid villain whom Rudi also rescues, for good measure. By the author of The White Tower and aimed at the schoolboy trade, this is a slick, readable fictionalized account of the 1865 conquest of the Matterhorn: half as high as Mt. Everest, and nearly half as interesting.

THE FIVE SEASONS by Karl Eska (344 pp.; Viking; $3.95) was written out of his wartime experience in Soviet Asia by an anti-Nazi Austrian, who is using a pseudonym for this work. The fifth season of the title is famine -- a famine brought on by the blunders of Russian planners in the Turkmen republic and made more terrible by the party's refusal to recognize its existence. The Reds keep parroting, "No one in this country goes hungry." As bodies pile up in the streets, the bosses try to explain them away as caused by typhus and by neglecting "the elementary principles of hygiene." In the march-past of commissars, thieves, forced laborers, secret police, distraught mothers and sullen children there are few really absorbing villains, nor are there any heroes -- or even very likable people. The book's impact, as well as its conviction, comes from the author's own involvement in the horrors of which he writes: it is a cry, not only from the steppes of central Asia, but from the lower depths of Stalin's new society.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.