Mixed Fiction

Mixed Fiction FOR EVERY FAVOUR, by Ruby Ferguson (320 pp.; Little, Brown; $3.95), is a report on that lost time when the grapes were always plump in the hothouse and no butler ever stole a spoon. Instead of telling the gloom of aristocrats obliged to do without servants, English Novelist Ruby Ferguson, 57, resourcefully chronicles the even gloomier situation of servants who have run out of aristocrats. Her story about the decline, fall and resurrection of Edward Shrewsbury, the perfect butler, is calculated to make envious many a lady novelist who has never thought of using butlers for any purpose but getting characters in and out of doors.

Edward was a Shropshire lad, the son of a gardener, and he knew his place. At Merryns, the stately home of Lord and Lady Cedely, he shed a footman's livery and became Edward, the beloved family retainer ("Six foot of superb young animal. If he was a horse, I'd give three hundred guineas for him," said his lordship). He had a peerless touch with silver teapots and under-footmen, could fold a table napkin into a water lily, and the young people adored him. Alas, he adored one of the young people, the Honorable Isobel Lintern, a rather dishonorable hussy. With blind folly, Shrewsbury threw away his perfect character in Merryns for the wretched minx. Embittered and ruined, he became porter at a low pub. How he buttled back from this social abyss to become a perfect butler in Manhattan is a story which will bring tears to the eyes of that dwindling body of citizens who have at heart the care and preservation of butlers.

The reader should be warned that this remarkably innocent book is neither a satire nor a comedy, though sometimes there is room for doubt, particularly when it comes to the episode about Edward's early service with an "infamous Major Kinryce." One day the unthinkable happens: Mrs. Kinryce tries to fire him. Edward "thought pityingly that she might be going mad. 'Excuse me, Madam, but you can't dismiss me. I only take notice from Major Kinryce.' Her cold eyes in her haggard face fixed him fearfully. 'I shot him just now with his old service pistol . . . You must go and fetch me a policeman.' "

THE ETRUSCAN, by Mika Waltari (381 pp.; Pufnam; $4.50), takes its readers on a Cook's tour of the Mediterranean world of 500 B.C. The voluble guide is a young superman called Turms, who clobbers men, conquers women and seeks his ease in the lap of the gods ("I saw her, the goddess, taking shape and resting lightly on the couch, lovelier than all earthly women . . ."). Turms is also busy making history. He contributes to the death struggle between Greece and Persia by setting fire to the temple of the Persian goddess Cybele in Sardis, helps incite war between Carthage and Sicily, insults the majesty of Rome, and leads his fellow Etruscans to ruin on the bloody field of Himera. In the end he goes alone to his doomed homeland in Etruria, where the famed twelve "sacred cities" stand in an elegiac hush awaiting the final onslaught of Gauls from the north and Romans from the south that will erase the Etruscan language and religion from history.

In this book Finland's Mika Waltari (The Egyptian, The Wanderer) has another candidate for the bestseller list. Though the writing is often stiff, the dialogue stilted, and the overdoses of sex a little ridiculous, the nonskipping reader will gain a primer knowledge of a world where God was absent but the gods were everywhere. The "polytheistic madness" of the pagans eventually made them turn almost in relief to the oneness of Christ but, in the time of The Etruscan, their faith was characterized by an almost total absence of the Christian feelings of sinfulness and humility. It is this rude strength of paganism that Waltari has most believably caught, and his hero's initiation into the mysteries of being a Lucumo, or holy man, echoes--and may well be based upon--the exaltation described by Lucius Apuleius in The Golden Ass during his similar initiation at Corinth.

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