THE CAMERONS

by ROBERT CRICHTON

509 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Fashionable French film directors (Rohmer, Truffaut) are now busily reinventing the 19th century novel of feeling for cinema audiences, who, it sometimes seems, no longer read. One can hardly blame Robert Crichton, therefore, if he puts between hard covers the makings of one of those harrowing, heartwarming 1930s film sagas that used to star Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, attractively but thinly disguised as proletarians on the rise. The time is turn of the century; the place, a Scottish coalpit town complete with oppressed miners, strikes and lockouts, an unfeeling owner and a bloody-minded mine superintendent named Mr. Brothcock. Crichton's story centers on a Scots lass with a will of steel who marries a fine free Highlander, turns him into a miner and plots the escape of their family, the Camerons, from pit and penury through years of sacrifice and discipline. Naturally they do escape, not in the way expected, but to America where one suspects the author will find them making their way in a sequel.

Crichton is the author of the highly successful Secret of Santa Vittoria, and this book is already a bestseller. Yet The Camerons curiously resembles an autobiographical first novel; its uneven scenes are sometimes sheer cardboard, sometimes compelling. Easy complaints about slickness, commerce and sentimentality, though, do not do justice to the great affection and knowledge that Crichton shows. His description of a starved, out-of-work miner treating himself to one golden, fabulously self-indulgent, perfectly boiled egg would splinter a heart of oak.

AUGUSTUS by JOHN WILLIAMS 305 pages. Viking. $7.95.

His great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, has had a far better press: well-publicized conquests, a dramatic assassination, a sympathetic portrait by one William Shakespeare. Yet historians generally agree that Caesar's lesser-known nephew and heir, Gaius Octavius Caesar--later to be called Augustus--was in many ways a greater man. His conquests endured longer than those of Napoleon and Alexander; the imperial system he painfully built took five centuries to decay; the Pax Romana he warred to achieve was one of the longest periods of relative peace that history has ever known. The man himself, however, even in this excellent study by Novelist and Poet John Williams, has remained elusive.

Williams attacks his subject from the flank, through the invented journals and letters of Augustus' family, friends and enemies. He breathes life into Old Friend Maecenas, generous patron of the poet Horace but a terrible versifier himself, and the fluttery Ovid, burlesqued by Williams in a splendidly overblown poem. The most vivid character is Augustus' daughter Julia, a Becky Sharp of the Roman salon.

Augustus never quite takes on the same forthright humanity. Only in the novel's final sequence, where the dying Emperor writes a long apologia to his only remaining friend, does Williams dare to do what Robert Graves did in I, Claudius and step into Caesar's shoes. Augustus emerges as a man wanting to be human but convinced that his destiny will not allow it. Like Jean Anouilh's Creon, he found his world in disorder, a masterless ship with the wheel spinning free. Williams has evoked the awful human cost of setting the ship back on course--a course, as Augustus ruefully foresees, that is only the long way round to doom.

THE WILBY CONSPIRACY

by PETER DRISCOLL

324 pages. Lippincott. $6.95.

The essentials of a good pursuit thriller have varied little since Richard Hannay took his first steps. The hero--canonically, he will be English, an engineer, home from Africa--acts from pure impulse to help some little guy in danger and thus takes on a mission he does not understand. Through countryside of great variety and beauty he flees from the police and usually some alien political enemies as well. Chivvied on, he slowly penetrates the aims of his pursuers, each revelation concealing within it a further duplicity, until a border is crossed back into the sane and normal world, where right prevails.

Author Peter Driscoll has assembled the classic elements with smooth variations. His English engineer, Jim Keogh, is on leave in Cape Town when he rescues a black man being beaten by an Afrikaner cop. The black turns out to be a political fugitive. They escape together, north across the Great Karroo and the Highveldt toward Johannesburg and the Botswana border, pursued by the political police. Along the way they meet a splendid Afrikaner secret agent named Horn, as sinister as a deadly fungus.

Skillfully, without any self-consciousness, Driscoll offers the obligatory bag of uncut contraband diamonds and a perilous descent by rope and bosun's chair into a bottomless sinkhole. There are no lions or giraffes, and the only buffalo is up on the wall where he belongs in a tale like this.

THE GREAT BRIDGE

by DAVID McCULLOUGH

636 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.95.

It had to leap the swift tidal waters of the East River, at 1,595 feet the longest span ever tried at the time anywhere in the world. Most experts felt it couldn't or shouldn't be done. But in the 1860s two leading citizens of bustling Brooklyn yearned for an all-weather link to New York City. Tammany Hall's beady-eyed Grand Sachem, William Marcy Tweed, who had already swindled millions in contracts for what should have been a $250,000 courthouse, saw the bridge as an even more lucrative project.

The building of the Brooklyn Bridge was therefore authorized in 1867. That it was eventually completed, in 1883, as one of the greatest accomplishments of technology and perseverance that the world has ever seen was due largely to the passion and vision of engineer John Augustus Roebling, a wealthy wire-rope manufacturer from Trenton, N.J., and his son Washington. German born (he actually studied under Hegel) and a proven designer of long suspension spans, the elder Roebling drew up daring plans for the bridge but died in 1869, before the work started. Washington took over and launched the building. He was soon obsessed with the project--a sort of Engineer Ahab. By 1873, he had driven himself to mental and physical exhaustion. He was confined to his Brooklyn Heights house for a rest, but carried on, supervising the work by telescope from his riverfront window as his long-suffering wife Emily relayed messages to and from the project.

There is scarcely a dull page in David McCullough's story. The reader descends with the sand hogs into the huge, dim airtight caissons on which the bridge towers would stand. In the atmosphere of compressed air, workers got the bends. But no one knew what the disorder was. Those afflicted were treated with a shot of whisky and a rubdown. Brave and nimble wire crews climbed 20 stories high on the towers, spun 900 miles of wire into four great cables, then hung 832 "suspenders" to carry the long deck.

The bridge took 14 years to build, cost $15 million and killed at least 20 workers. It helped bring about Boss Tweed's fall. More important, its progress toward completion, like this book, summed up an optimistic, exuberant era.

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