Man up a Tree

THE BARON IN THE TREES (217 pp.)--Italo Calvino--Random House ($3.50)

One of the nicest ways to get awa> from it all is to go climb a tree--every child knows that. Seen from a stout limb and framed in shade, the world seems a safer and more interesting place. But sooner or later the child must come down to earth. In this novel, the hero never comes down, and neither does Italian Author Italo Calvino. He seems to have had great fun dreaming up his fantasy; all he asks of the reader is a suspended intelligence and a taste for the bizarre.

The time is 1767, and great political and social changes are on the way. but the Di Rondo family is as impervious to change as only true eccentrics can be. When young Cosimo, an alarmingly imaginative twelve-year-old, has a run-in with his stuffy father, he climbs a big tree and vows, "I'll never come down again!" And he doesn't--for more than half a century. The area around the little north Italian town of Ombrosa is so heavily forested that he can travel for miles swinging from tree to tree like an 18th century Tarzan. He builds tree houses and shoots game. He climbs down to a low branch to milk a complacent goat, trains a hen to lay in a convenient place. A limb overhanging a swift-running stream makes an excellent toilet.

Cosimo becomes famous. Voltaire inquires about him, and when Napoleon visits Ombrosa he chats with Cosimo, risking a stiff neck as he looks up to the treed man. Cosimo has adventures with bandits and pirates that Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would have been embarrassed to find in a movie script, and enjoys a love affair that is as notable for its acrobatics as for its passion. He is neither an outcast nor a misanthrope. In fact, he is a heroic do-gooder whose office just happens to be a forked tree.

Aside from well-written and amusing scenes. The Baron in the Trees stops short of real worth. Its satire on life-on-the-ground is too tentative to slice deep, and only once does Author Calvino suggest a theme. That is when Voltaire asks Cosimo's brother: "But is it to be nearer the sky that your brother stays up there?" The answer: "My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it."

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