Fall Foliage

THE WANDERER (438 pp.)-Mika Waltari-Pufnam ($3.75).

THE VIKING (380 pp.)-Edison Marshall-Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

THE UTMOST ISLAND (216 pp.)-Henry Myers-Crown ($3).

A FLIGHT OF FALCONS (351 pp.)-Francoise d'Eaubonne-McGraw-Hill $3.75).

As is usual in the U.S. fall, historical novels have been fluttering down like autumn leaves. Few of them will stay very long. In general, publishers will be well satisfied to see the last copies lying like mulch at the foot of the nation's Christmas trees. Meanwhile, for the next few weeks, they will be spread far & wide by the big wind of publicity. The ruddiest of them:

The Wanderer, by Mika Waltari, may be a bit of a disappointment to the author's fans. Its story moves intelligibly from episode to episode, and its characters are sufficiently self-consistent so that it is possible to tell them apart. But the old Waltari charm is not there. The hero is a Finnish boy named Michael who sails aboard a pilgrim ship for Palestine, only to be lugged off to the African slave markets by Moslem pirates. Thenceforward, he ricochets about the Ottoman Empire-from the fall of Algiers to the siege of Vienna to the campaigns in Persia-like some 16th Century Lanny Budd with a bath towel wound around his head. The reader is carried along with Michael's story by a trick of suspense that is original, if nothing else: When, where & how will the hero have to submit to the Mohammedan rite of circumcision?

The Viking, by Edison Marshall, seems to be written expressly for readers who collect unusual sensations. For the ladies there is, for instance, the medieval equivalent of the cold shower: the feel of icy armor against warm bosom. For the men there are the more elaborate pleasures of the fray, such as "The Red Eagle": a pet Norse revenge, in which a man's belly is slit from side to side, and his lungs hauled out through the opening. Otherwise, it is the story of a Danish slave boy, Ogier, who wins his freedom and roves with the Viking freebooters from Iceland to Italy. In the end, he marries a princess and sails with her to discover a land that Ogier called Avalon, but that sounds very much like America.

The Utmost Island, by Henry Myers, gives the discovery of America still another run through the typewriter. Myers sticks to the old story that it was Leif Ericsson, not Ogier and the princess, who deserves the credit. But Author Myers is dissatisfied with all accepted versions of Leif's adventures, and offers a revised one: Leif was not on his way to Christianize Greenland-he was simply an old-fashioned pagan, making sea tracks from Norway because he couldn't stand Christianity at home.

Myers sometimes writes as if he had gone berserk, but just as often, in his effort to persist in the singsong scaldic tone of his tale, he loses his reader in thick northern mists.

A Flight of Falcons, by Francoise d'Eaubonne, is an attempt by a young Frenchwoman to write a historical novel in the grand manner of The Cloister and the Hearth, and she achieves a considerable success.

Author d'Eaubonne affects to have translated her novel from the 16th Century Flemish memoir of one Jan van Ster-teen, an atheistic painter who, toward the year 1595, met up in London with a traveling mountebank named Jonathan William Anthony Oldhorse. Oldhorse, a born leader, forms a blood-brotherhood between the Fleming, a gay young Frenchman named Marie-Jean-Pierre Saint-Benoist, and a pensive Jew named Jacob Keepjeke. They all agree to obey Old-horse to the death, and soon set out for

India like a flight of falcons, to seek their common fortune and salvation.

They find something of both, and-far rarer in historical novels-they also find life, a world of real people, growing thick as thorn bushes across their tropic path. Van Sterteen falls in love with a Spanish girl so proud that she will marry him and bear his child, but will not lie and say that she loves him. At the end, she goes to her death for a brigand whose only caress was administered with a horsewhip. Saint-Benoist is caught up in a struggle to save his soul. Oldhorse, the man with a vision, drives on to his goal (the establishment of a humanitarian-and profitable-state) with the world-weariness of the true devotee. "I'm tired, Jan," he once murmurs, "tired to death of all these people who love."

Author d'Eaubonne, in short, has the psychological as well as the historical sense; and most notable of all, she has a sense of style that gives her story the hard, bright ring of the true metal.

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