Red Monte Cristo

THE WORLD Is MINE--William Blake--Simon & Schuster ($3).

This 741-page historical melodrama about "a modern Monte Cristo" is an unusual tale. Most extraordinary thing about it is its echoes of Christina Stead's month-and-a-half-old House of All Nations (TIME, June 13). Both novels run to about the same length, both have the same satirical, tight-nerved, epigrammatic slant on their backgrounds of international high finance, war and revolution. The World Is Mine, with a more extravagant range, livelier plot, less diffuseness, is better than Author Stead's brilliant book.

Curious parallels show in the two authors' backgrounds as well. Son of a Midwest surgeon, pseudonymous William Blake, now in his 403, has been a broker and financial editor in Wall Street and Europe, four years ago went into the grain business in Antwerp, where Christina

Stead also got her detailed background material on the machinations of international speculators.

Whether or not Author Blake's hero is an improvement on Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, he cannot be called an imitation. Cristobal Hernando Pinzon, handsome, precocious hero of the tale, lives for a revenge that is all his own. At 21, on the eve of the World War, Cristobal is a director of a Jesuit bank, making a mere $50,000 a year. At War's end, his daring speculations have made him the richest man in the world. Meanwhile, he has helped rig a Papal election, has picked up two shady stooges and has narrowly missed marrying a rich, broad-shouldered, English adventuress. His next four affairs are merely talismans for guiding his speculations. A Russian exile's hard-luck tales, for example, prompt him to bet on Lenin, short-sell Russian bonds at a huge profit.

During the dull days of post-War recovery, Cristobal goes to work on four English bankers who stole his father's copper mine, ruins them separately with deliberately prolonged, sadistic finesse. Tuning up for the last revenge, on capitalism, Cristobal begins by short-selling the world's best shoe and smelting stock in memory of Sacco and Vanzetti, utilities in honor of Tom Mooney, and so on through all the martyrs of radicalism. Meanwhile he has married a poor, tuberculous girl, returned to Spain to finance an uprising. A hero in the first days of the Spanish Civil War, Cristobal suggests buying off the Rebels, goes down because he has held his ten-billion-dollar ace too long.

Like House of All Nations, The World Is Mine is a novel with an unpredictable future. Safest bet is that a few readers will enjoy its spotty but brilliant literary coloring, while the rest get the effect of a faulty spectrum that whirls out of a bad shade of red.

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