End Game

A SIGNAL VICTORY (224 pp.)--David Stacton--Pantheon ($3.95).

David Stacton's sourly excellent historical novels are like chess games of long-dead masters, replayed from dusty notes. The author moves the pieces for both black and white, knowing the outcomes, musing on strengths and weaknesses unseen by the players. It is to catalyze these dark musings, not to commemorate the players, that Stacton restages the old battles. Not surprisingly, his novels lack the painted scenery and speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there is not a line of dialogue. The book's most vivid presence is that of Author Stacton, brooding in mordant aphorisms about the uses of power. Everything is stated in epigrams, and he can drop the material for an evening's argument into an apparently offhand phrase such as: "Like all fanatics, he thought in negatives . . ."

Yet following Stacton's tortuous meditations has its rare rewards. Without 400 pages of cutlass work, the invading Spanish are contemptuously summed up: "They knew nothing of navigation. That they left to the Portuguese. When there was something to shoot, they shot it. When there was nothing to shoot, they prayed." The author admires the doomed Mayas, the soft, proud, cruel, devious fanciers of blood sacrifices. It is a measure of his skill that he persuades the reader to admire them, too.

At the book's focus is a dim figure from history, a Spanish renegade named Guerrero, who tried to shake the Maya princes from their fatalism and organize resistance to the invaders. The enigma of Guerrero is not fully resolved at the book's end; he is a less complete character than that other Stacton enigma, the Pharaoh Ikhnaton of the brilliant On a Balcony (TIME, Sept. 6. 1959). The trouble may be that philosophical novelists are, in their weakest moments, tract-writing zealots. Stacton's message in this book is that the proper study of doomed men is how to die with dignity. But in his eagerness to give his hero a suitable death, he has neglected to bring him credibly to life.

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