Literary Conglomerate

By Timothy Foote

THE ODESSA FILE by FREDERICK FORSYTH 337 pages. Viking. $7.95.

After The Day of the Jackal any new book by Frederick Forsyth is likely to come on as a literary conglomerate. Flaunting its paperback and film sales, Reader's Digest condensation, etc., Odessa does just that. Its list of book clubs reads like the tag end of a distinguished obituary--member of Literary Guild, Saturday Review, Book Find and Playboy. Despite such signs of prosperity, the book is a mixed offering.

Forsyth offers a good deal of thinly disguised journalism (very good) about Odessa, the secret organization set up by the German SS during World War II. In 1945 with millions stolen from Jews and vanquished peoples, Odessa helped SS members to go underground or escape to foreign countries. Later it began to reinfiltrate them into German life, as it plotted a return to power and tried to vitiate SS guilt by encouraging the notion that the whole German people are to blame for the millions of SS murders.

This background slowly blends with two creaking plots. One involves a 1964 SS plan to install teleguidance systems for some German rockets based at Helwan in Nasser's Egypt. The second sends a brash young German reporter searching for a former SS captain and war criminal who turns up alive and devilishly deep in West German industry and the rocket caper.

Forsyth has enormous trouble getting all this together and rumbling down the runway fast enough for takeoff. But finally, on page 189, the reporter's search turns into a good, old-fashioned chase, with the bad SS guys hop-skipping along after him trying to head him off or do him in.

Forsyth's skillful set-piece description of how to make a bomb and attach it to a Jaguar XK 1505 (using five rubber erasers and a broken hacksaw blade) is a model of worldly efficiency. But he is also capable of howlingly unintentional humor. After pages and pages recalling the ferocity of the SS, a Jewish survivor warns the young reporter: "Do be careful. These men can be dangerous."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.