Silly Milly in Slavonia

THE VISITORS (576 pp.)--Mary McM/'n-nies--Harcourt, Brace ($4.95).

It may or may not be true that foreigners are funny, that men are silly and that dictatorships are absurd. At any rate, British Novelist Mary McMinnies makes it seem that way. With breathless garrulity she has spun out a story about a raft of people afloat on an ocean of misery in a modern people's republic. (The country is called Slavonia, and it resembles Poland, where she once lived with a British diplomat husband.) The "visitors" of the title --Americans and Britons engaged in the black art of propaganda--never had it so good. Larry Purdoe is editor of the Voice of Britain, his assistant is a non-U type called Herbert Wragg, and their American friend is a newspaperman named Abe Schulman ("definitely a good type"). They have the whisky, the candy, the penicillin and the supreme good luck of not being totally at the mercy of the people's police.

There are serpents in this artificial Eden. As foreigners, they are plagued by spies and boredom. As one character sums it up: "Too many ruddy parties. Too many wives--too much nattering over canasta, coffee and so on . . ." What is worse, there is "hanky-panky with the bag," i.e., polite smuggling under diplomatic cover and black-market trade in PX items. This is the basis of a complicated but well-drawn plot in which Novelist McMinnies demonstrates that she knows her way around Eastern Europe as well as her first book, The Flying Fox (TIME, March 11, 1957) showed that she could make her way through the simpler jungles of Malaya.

As good Britons. Writer McMinnies' characters spend a good deal of time brooding over breeding. Her characters are as itchily class conscious as if they knew they wore shirts made of the wrong kind of hair and were too proud to scratch. The trouble begins when beautiful Milly Purdoe starts the hanky-panky with the diplomatic bag and makes a baggage of herself with her husband's friends. Unfortunately, the natives are better at this sort of thing, and Milly only proves that Britons never should be Slavs.

Novelist McMinnies sketches her backgrounds with the confidence of good journalism, and her minor characters are memorable doodles:

P: Count Ludovic Bielski, who illustrates the pathetic impotence of the old regime by spending his days knitting his own silk socks.

P:Colonel Cantrell, a cold collation of cliches, who provides a brutal portrait of a modern British bureaucrat. P: Sophie Bielska, who is destroyed by her own Anglophilia. She loves to say "dash it all," and her finest hours are those she spends with her fine British friends; happily, perhaps, she never makes it to an England that never was. P:Herbert Wragg, whose honeymoon was spoiled because the toilet paper at the progressive boarding house he stayed at consisted of squares from the Daily Worker.

Author McMinnies is not a novelist of the first rank, but her second book puts her well in the fore of the usual crowded field panting for the Ladies' Plate. The shrewd characters who make book on form --the book-clubmakers--have given her the accolade (Book-of-the-Month). After the novel's male characters have rescued Milly from the consequences of her own idiocy, the heroine, seemingly immune from disaster, asks her husband: "Darling, where do you suppose we'll go next?" Fans of Milly--or of Author McMinnies --can hardly wait to find out.

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