The New Man

ORDERS OF CHIVALRY (320 pp.)--Peter Vansittart--Abelard-Schuman ($4).

"There are crises when people lose their skeletons and dwindle to a mess of unresolved aims, regrets, opportunities." And it is in such crises that the aimless look hungrily around in search of men who dazzle, hypnotize, even defraud them by sheer audacity. That is the text of British Novelist Peter Vansittart's latest novel (his first to be published in the U.S. was The Game and The Ground--TIME, May 6, 1957). Orders of Chivalry is witty, satirical, and one of the toughest, most trenchant novels to come out of Britain in recent years. Author Vansittart (38-year-old distant cousin of Britain's late Diplomat Lord Robert Vansittart) shows a boldly romantic streak in admiration for such old-fashioned virtues as duty, discipline, honor and obedience.

The novel is centered upon London, a city struggling to forget the Pusan road, "the Commonwealth youngsters skewered on the Dieppe beaches," and Kenya's savage snipers. As the story unfolds--it is seen through the plain, distressed eyes of Captain Alan Curtis, veteran of Korea, Kenya, Cyprus--TV Tycoon Lord Arthur Illius announces plans for a Festival of London. A prize, gravely named the Grail, is offered to the citizen who contributes the best ideas to the festival, so all Britain is abuzz with ludicrous suggestions: "Demands to restore the pillory; to rebuild horse-troughs; proposals that women should wear wimples in August; that the Duke of Edinburgh should open a Joust in full armour." Around Lord Illius himself clot applauding yes men, tame academics and cultural parasites, all out to dazzle the bored and lonely multitude.

Mysterious Trio. The man who is destined to win the Grail through his design for a festival pavilion is of a different, tougher breed. Marko Zuckerman's eyes speak, "Mongol-wise," of historic rapacity and plunder. His past is a mystery; all that is known of him is that he fled Hungary after World War II, showed up briefly in Paris with a big wad of money, then settled in Britain to amass more.

To frivolous Londoners, Marko seems just another glamorous eccentric, sent to amuse and thrill them with his daring antics. When, one evening, Marko appears at a reception and a rough voice bellows from the audience, "What about Varga, Lener, Goldfink?", everyone rocks with laughter at what seems an inexplicable joke. But as the months pass and the unreal festival approaches, the names of the mysterious trio keep echoing through London. Finally, a bomb of accusation bursts, in the form of the question: Did Marko make his first millions by selling his three compatriots to the Gestapo?

Along with an answer to the question, the reader also gets Marko's rationalization. "I am not my brother's keeper," he tells Captain Curtis. "I am interested in survival ... I do.not want to become a suburb of Cairo, or Moscow. A Chinese comfort-station ... I want to defend myself ... I want a new man."

Wrong Side. Alan Curtis, haunted by history, has a different slant on Marko's "new man." He says: "I sometimes get a dream in which all the barricades are down. Police, law, everything gone. The whole city defenceless . . . Terror and break-up everywhere: barbarians at the frontier, and minor thugs in smart suits like Marko driving expensive cars on the wrong side of the road."

Besides Author Vansittart's life-size argument, the book presents a big, detailed panorama of modern London and its crowds, ranging from celebrities "with sixteen-jewelled smiles" to factory hands who no longer smile at all. So much, in fact, is packed into the story that often the Vansittart sentences become clogged --a penalty often paid by authors who have so much to say that their utterance is choked by the intensity of their ideas.

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