Fresh Off the Assembly Line

ARMAGEDDON by Leon Uris. 632 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Hmm. Bank balance down. Time to do another Big Novel. But what about? The marines in World War II? Did that one already. Maybe the Kaiser's war? Ancient history. The Israeli thing, and beautiful deep-chested broads with big bandoleers standing ankle-deep in the dirt of the kibbutzim? Ah, there's a bestselling idea. Too bad, did that one too. What's left? Got it! Berlin and the airlift. It has flyers and wild blue yonders, and conflict with the Russkies, and a small band of far-seeing Army officers, and fraeuleins, and bad Germans and maybe a few good ones this time, and . . .

Leon Uris' new novel is the predictable end product of an interior monologue just like that. And it must be conceded that Uris, who once publicly pronounced himself "the most outstanding U.S. writer of today," has succeeded astonishingly in his aim: into this big bad book he has packed away every conceivable stock figure, from the nice Russian officer (Igor) trapped by the system, to the beautiful whore (Hilde) who reforms and then softens the hard heart of the dashing American pilot (Scott, what else?).

Uris put in about three years of research and writing to produce this book. It reads as if it were not written at all but dictated, Napoleon style, at top speed to at least two secretaries at once, and the resulting manuscript corrected with a glass in one hand, a cigar in the other, and no place to hold the blue pencil. Even the title is a piece of mindless sensationalism: Berlin was not a battle, let alone the last one.

Uris piles up countless petty errors of fact, even of grammar ("It's a good thing English has nothing to do with writing" is another Uris pronouncement). The airlift and the gutty Berliners deserve a better chronicler.

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