Mixed Fiction

A CHANGE OF MIND, by G. M. Glaskin (232 pp.; Doubleday; $3.95), carries the novel of escape to the point of no return. What, asks Australian Novelist Glaskin, is the fix of a fellow who finds that his mind has entered the body of another man? The answers are provided by a pair of hapless friends who have been dabbling in hypnotism and find themselves the bewildered guinea pigs in a case of "inter-transmigration."

Envy is the true villain of the piece. Edward Henderson is a middle aged, mild little accountant who envies his fishing pal's fine body, the virility of his 25 years, his casual good looks. Roger, a simple mechanic, in turn is envious of Henderson's tidy income, his complacent marriage. Henderson is the amateur hypnotist, Roger the willing subject, and one night when their mutual covetousness is at its height and hypnosis is at work, the switch takes place. Author Glaskin is the kind of fantasist who keeps things on a plane so practical that anyone can sympathize with his heroes' troubles. Henderson, who formerly could not stand whisky, now prefers it, while the former mechanic suddenly finds himself with a taste for good brandy. What is worse, neither man can go to his accustomed work.

In the long run, it is Henderson who comes off best. True, he loses his wife, but he now realizes that he never loved her anyway. He revels in his handsome physique (women do too), takes a new name and starts a new life. But poor Roger is stuck with a mind that was commonplace to begin with, a body long since unaccustomed to physical joy, a set of false teeth, and Mrs. Henderson, who still thinks that he is her husband but insane. As Roger's end shows. Author Glaskin's powers of invention are unfortunately limited and his writing is graceless. What recommends the book is chiefly its intriguing central idea, which suggests a hitherto untold Tale of Hoffmann as it might have been rendered by Thorne Smith.

IMPERIAL-CAESAR, by Rex Warner (393 pp.; Atlantic--Little, Brown; $5), recalls the fact that, perhaps because he campaigned on their island in 55-54 B.C., British writers have been markedly fond of Julius Caesar. From Shakespeare to Shaw, they have drawn a quasi-Churchil-lian portrait of the Roman dictator--arrogant and domineering on occasion, but indomitable in adversity, magnanimous in victory, farsighted in policy. British Author Rex Warner, an old hand at translating Caesar, has set out to fictionize him. In doing so, he carries fondness a step farther and tries to quash the lingering suspicion that Caesar may just possibly have robbed the Romans of some basic freedoms.

It is the night before the Ides of March. As in Warner's earlier volume, The Young Caesar, a restlessly wakeful Julius is musing --in flashbacks--over his career. Since the book covers the last 15 years of Caesar's life, he has a lot to muse over. First, Caesar remembers marching into Gaul, and Author Warner does ample justice to the tactics of the Gallic wars (as Caesar did in his own Commentaries), but considering that a million tribesmen were killed and another million taken prisoner, Warner's account of the campaigns is curiously bloodless. All the other facts are equally familiar--the First Triumvirate, the attempt by Pompey and a senatorial faction to curb Caesar's growing authority, the crossing of the Rubicon and the outbreak of civil war, Pompey's flight and Caesar's mastery of all Italy. By couching his narrative in the first person, supposedly in the hero's own words, the author tries to capture the view from Caesar's head.

Apart from pithy comments on soldiering, Warner's Caesar defends himself as a kind of imperial efficiency expert surrounded by captious, old-fashioned critics, including Cicero and Cato, who are blindly resisting change. He is an Organization Superman who wants to transform Rome from a forum of squabbling, parochial rivals to an orderly, centralized headquarters of empire. Argues Caesar: "A great empire could not be administered by relays of incompetent politicians. 'Liberty' meant nothing but restriction and inefficiency."

This, of course, is part of the great, continuing debate between democracy and tyranny. Like any reliable historical fiction, Imperial Caesar lacks the element of surprise, but it does move with the fateful tread of a great man's destiny.

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