A Banner on a Muddy Field

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK by David Stacton. 381 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

"It was a model of the world, with the roof taken off and the streets torn up," is Author Stacton's description of a Spanish army bivouac into which a couple of his characters have strayed during the Thirty Years War. Stacton could also be describing his own novel abovit that war. In that camp, the civilians--stable boys, prostitutes, grooms, bakers, wine sellers, nurses, wives, peddlers, moneylenders, cardsharps, children, thieves, thugs, priests, a company of traveling actors--outnumber the soldiers by as much as eight to one, and the same wild and brutalized rabble roils through the pages of the book. All are lit up as if by the lurid flare of torches and burning towns and the intermittent flash of gunpowder. Even the occasional brave or intelligent man is no more in control of his fate than any of the others. After a while the reader begins desperately to wish that the author had not torn up all those streets in his model world: the novel is fascinating, brilliant, but exasperatingly trackless.

Splendor & Slime. David Stacton has been brilliant and exasperating before this. In a dozen earlier novels he has illuminated dark corners of everything from ancient Egypt to feudal Japan, from the gory Renaissance legend of the Duchess of Amalfi to the aftermath of the assassination of Lincoln. In each, over the violent pulse and slash of ancient action broods a satanic modern intelligence. He is unique for the wit and sinewy pertinence of his asides. And until now, his story lines have also been clearly muscled, if often knotty.

People of the Book tells not one but two parallel stories. The first follows the public acts and private thoughts of the two great Protestant leaders of the Thirty Years War, the brilliant commander King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and his equally brilliant chief minister, Axel Oxenstierna. The second story dives into the ebb and flow of destruction across the shattered principalities of Central Europe to follow the fates of a young man, Lars Larsen, and the lovely little sister he is trying to bring up and lead to safety. The two stories join only at one point, where Oxenstierna happens to meet the two young people and, taking pity on them, gives them a safe-conduct that ironically leads to their deaths. Yet the two narratives could hardly be more intimately related. They are the gorgeous upper side and slimy reverse of a banner dragged across a muddy battlefield.

Paste Jewels. Stacton embellishes this attractive plan with his vivid sense of scene and detail. He freights it with learning and lively language. He floods it with his unique virtues--and the book drowns. Gustavus and Oxenstierna are the most real figures, but they are not really seen in action but in a series of stills, like a set of heroic paintings--"The Last Meeting," "Meditation in the Garden," "The King Falls in Battle." Lars and his sister are truly pitiable, but they are surrounded by grotesques, and at the end are dispatched with the terrible coldness of boredom.

Throughout, Stacton sacrifices story for gnomic utterance. He is often witty and pithy, as when he throws knives at such favorite targets as Richelieu (and De Gaulle): "Perfumes are best used to cover up the stinks of cunning. La Gloire de France is a perfume." He is sometimes eccentrically decorative, as when he fondles a favorite word (panache, chryselephantine) or interpolates an essay on ancient music or a sermon on international law. However entertaining, the devices are finally irrelevant and intrusive. Their cumulative effect is as pointless as a sword swallower who decides to eat the hilt first because the paste jewels seem so bright and chewy.

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