Medieval Tapestry

THE CORNERSTONE (482 pp.)--Zoe Oldenbourg--Pantheon ($4.50).

This artfully written French historical novel plunges its readers into the violence of an epoch when knighthood was in flower but life was no bed of roses. Three generations of the House of Linnieres play out their lives against a background of medieval manners and 13th; century skulduggery.

Old Ansiau, knight and onetime Crusader, sets out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, becomes blind on the way, is captured in the Holy Land by the infidel and lashed to a mill which he is forced to turn like an ox. His son Herbert le Gros, a gay blade who lives life to the hilt, meanwhile sticks to the manor, takes all the land and love he can get, and happily commits incest with his wild and passionate half sister, who hates him ("I shall . . . make his blood rot, send snakes to drink his eyes, and leeches to suck his heart").

The third generation has lost the lust for power but kept the impulse toward God. Young Haguenier, Herbert's son, is a moonstruck knight who has chosen to serve a frigid beauty and waits in vain for her to thaw. It is hard to believe that any man, saint or fool, would observe the for mal demands of chivalry and obey each of his lady's whims (such as entering a joust in which his only shield is a mirror that must not be damaged). But Haguenier fulfills all his "trials" until he is driven to drink and finally into a monastery.

Russian-born Zoe Oldenbourg's complex tale of knights and knaves is packed with scenes of horror. Children are slaughtered, adolescent girls raped, women's breasts cut off, men's eyes torn out. But unlike most historical novelists, Author Oldenbourg does not indulge in bloodletting and vices for the sake of the thrill. She has merely held up a mirror to the 13th century so that her readers might know what it was like. Young Haguenier's marriage and romance show in painstaking detail how a young man of good family once lived, wedded and loved. Herbert's story is a chilling indication of what life could be like for serfs and the members of a noble family when the lord was hard, lewd and avaricious. Old Ansiau's pilgrimage, full of pathos and compassion, cuts to the heart of a century in which deep religious feeling and incredible brutality could exist side by side. In her novel (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Author Oldenbourg has woven a huge and intricate tapestry of a medieval society so successfully that most people will be happy to look at it -- and even hap pier never to have been part of it.

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