Something for the Gulls

RANDALL AND THE RIVER OF TIME (341 pp.)--C.S. Forester--Little, Brown ($3).

On page 5 of Randall and the River of Time, the hero stands, in the year 1917, at the crossing of two trenches in France, and wonders which way to go. At that point Hero Charles Randall and Author C. S. Forester make their big mistake: the hero turns left. Had he turned right, Randall would have been neatly dispatched in a German raid on a British strongpoint. Author Forester, whose Captain Horatio Hornblower is one of the best historical romances in the language, would thus have been spared the shame of scattering Hornblower's wake with a fictional mess for the gulls; and poor Randall would have been spared a life that is not much better than death, anyway.

A sort of modern Everyman, Randall has Everyman's troubles with Nobody's ability to handle them. On page 11 he meets an "older woman" of 26 on a London tram. Only 20, and at his author's mercy, "Randall saw the full lips and not the weak chin," and so they were married. "Her hot shallow passion . . . roused convulsive feelings in Randall . . . The deep wells within him gushed with tenderness . . . And then peace descended on them both . . . like night coming down upon a tropical sunset"--in a London hotel.

Dazzled by such sexual scenery and frazzled by hard work (on a machine he has invented to help canners sort the wrinkled peas from the smooth), Randall does not realize that somebody else is watching the sunsets when he's not around. When at last he catches the poacher on his preserve, Randall gives him the heave and the plot a twist that will require some sequels to unwind.

Why did Novelist Forester push aside the hot roast beef of history, as he served it in the Hornblower series, to take up a cold contemporary potato like Randall? Says Forester: to convey the impact of fate on a man "who has lived through the wars and the depressions." In two projected novels, Randall is due for a flyer in high finance and a dive into the submarine campaigns of World War II.

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