Caveat Emptor

SOMETHING OF VALUE (566 pp.) --Roberf Ruark -- Doubleday ($5).

For the first time in its 29-year history, the Book-of-the-Month Club has sent out with a selection the dissenting opinion of one of its judges. Miss Amy Loveman, 73, an editor of the Saturday Review, offers an outright caveat emptor; Robert Ruark's new novel is, she says, "shocking."

Columnist-turned-Author Ruark (Horn of the Hunter, Grenadine Etching) is not likely to mind. Months before his bloody, big novel of Kenya's Mau Mau rising was due in bookstores. Hollywood paid a reported $450,000 for it.

Except for a perfunctory romantic thread, the story is all about Mau Mau.

The white hero is Peter McKenzie, a hulking young safari leader who can stalk a kudu, sight a Mannlicher-Schoenauer and get shikkered on gin with the best big-game hunters. The sinister shadow on his life is his childhood playmate, the black Kimani. who becomes a Mau Mau at bestial oath-taking ceremonies in a mountain hideout and butchers Peter's family in sanguinary scenes of the kind that Author Ruark insists upon describing over and over again in detail.

If Ruark is revolting in his anatomical accounts of Mau Mau barbarity, he runs amuck with his stories of the white man's revenge. When the white "commandos" catch the tribesmen, it is literally an eye for an eye. The hero himself cuts off one man's genitals, hacks out another's tongue, and, pinning a Mau Mau woman to the ground, tries unsuccessfully to get her to talk by dropping a two-foot snake upon her genitals. Finally Peter says: "I have shot only wart hogs and camp meat, so to speak . . . Now I want to go and find me a fine trophy ... I will collect old Kimani and hang him on the wall."

He corners Kimani at his mountain cave and strangles him. Then he carries Kimani's infant son down to the family farm, hoping that the child may grow up with his own sister's baby -- just as he and Kimani had before. In some vague way, suggests Author Ruark, the next generation may find peace; if not, the surviving baby can always serve as an excuse for an equally bloody sequel.

A Hemingway imitator who has made two or three safaris to Africa in the last few years, Author Ruark has obviously heard a lot of talk over the campfires and hotel bars. He has also looked over the published authorities -- one of his characters quotes whole pages from Negley Farson's Last Chance in Africa. Every thing that he reports may well have happened. But the real tragedy of black-white fratricide in Africa is hopelessly drowned in gore. Something of Value is a novel without taste or distinction.

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