NOTABLE

A CITY ON A HILL by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 256 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Cavanaugh's wife leaves him at the end of this political novel. She says she will be spending her time in Los Angeles at her public relations job. "All that'll console me," says Cavanaugh, who has a granitic and totally unsupported optimism, "is that you'll be able to keep your tan." The lady replies: "The pool at the apartment is too close to the road." That is a George Higgins touch. No minor mercies admitted.

A City on a Hill is a departure for Higgins. It is not a thriller, and the characters are middle-class people. Cavanaugh works for a Boston Congressman named Sam Barry who fought U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. But now it is the '70s: Barry does not realize that he has outlived his issue. What he does know is that '76 looks like "Jackson and Ford, which I do not want." He sends Cavanaugh off on an exhausting political swing trying to gain support for an idealistic Democratic Senator. No one gives a damn.

Higgins is not a good political novelist, at least in the traditional sense. Nothing much actually happens. But perhaps the author wants to say that politics is a lot of stale talk. Watergate flows in the book like so much flotsam. "Liddy had 50 Minoltas," remarks one character idly. Cavanaugh is amused by the fact that Vatican money financed the Watergate apartment building: "Maybe I should pay closer attention to what Monsignor Lally writes in the Pilot."

Lines like that--Lally edited and wrote for the Boston diocesan paper for 45 years--are rare, and the fan of earlier books like The Friends of Eddie Coyle wishes there were more. Missing too is the sheer busyness of Higgins' gangster population, those lowlife figures that are highly polished miniatures. Half the new book is paragraph after paragraph spliced by "Cavanaugh said." But the substratum that marks all Higgins' work is intact: a dark, unpanicked vision of people being shuffled around, losing out--and talking about it.

PEKING MAN

by HARRY L. SHAPIRO 190 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

THE SEARCH FOR PEKING MAN

by CHRISTOPHER G. JANUS with

WILLIAM BRASHLER 256 pages. Macmillan. $8.95.

With the possible exception of Martin Bormann, none of World War II's missing persons has been sought as assiduously as Peking Man, whose bones, unearthed from a quarry outside the Chinese capital in 1926, disappeared when the Japanese invaded the capital 15 years later. The two leading hunters have now written books. Christopher Janus, a Chicago businessman and amateur anthropologist, has spent a small fortune on the search. Professor Harry Shapiro, chairman emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History's department of anthropology, has been pursuing the missing bones ever since the war. In that time he has followed up scores of tips from strange people who are rarely willing to give their names. A typical phonecaller told Shapiro that the Peking Man is now held by an overseas Chinese businessman, but the informant refused to say more "because his tong would come and kill me."

The mystery began in 1941. With Japanese forces sweeping into China, Peking Man was crated and sent to a U.S. Marine base near Chingwangtao for shipment to safekeeping in the U.S. Before the Marines were able to leave, the Japanese arrived. In the confusion, the bones were lost. Or were they stolen? Over the years only one informant, a woman who said she was the widow of one of the Marines, claimed to have the bones in her possession. In 1972 she agreed to meet Janus and Shapiro on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, produced a photograph of what looked like the bones and offered to sell them for $500,000. But she fled, when a tourist seemed to be taking her picture. Since then, no one has been able to locate her.

Wherever he is, Peking Man is an anthropological treasure. Study of his 500,000-year-old remains using new methods might resolve a current controversy about evolution. Until Peking Man was discovered, most researchers assumed that the human family tree first took root in Africa. The existence of such a highly evolved individual in China suggests that there is more than one tree.

MIRROR MIRROR

by HARRIET WAUGH 250 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

This very British novel is about a man whose face is his misfortune, by a woman whose name may be hers. Its protagonist, Godfrey Pettlement, is so hideous that children whimper and adults recoil in shock when they see him. Even horror-film producers find him too ugly to cast. "One doesn't think of you having a normal figure," somebody tells Pettlement. "It would be more in keeping if you somehow sploshed along the ground or were drawn by suction power."

Poor Godfrey struggles through years of rejection before a rich young man accepts him, much as a lepidopterist might collect a grotesque rare moth. When the young man dies, he leaves Godfrey enough money to go to Britain's best plastic surgeon. What emerges is a face of such beauty that it suggests a saintly soul. Far from it. With beauty comes vindictiveness. Godfrey is bent on revenge for being spurned so long. He becomes a famous preacher who cries out to vast audiences: "Christ died for man to atone for sin. Can we do less for him?" In response, 332 people crucify themselves, and Godfrey himself is brought up short by a novitiate who plays Judith to his Holofernes.

So catholic a taste in carryings-on suggests the author's father, Evelyn Waugh. Inevitably Daughter Harriet, a sometime editor and technician in the London planetarium who has now written a first novel at 31, suffers in comparison, not only with Father but with precocious Brother Auberon, 35, who turned out The Foxglove Saga 15 years ago. Evelyn satirized his peers and times by following sane characters through a giddy world. Harriet uses the much less engaging converse: crazy people, sane society. The father's unremittingly inhospitable view of humanity lent his books bite and pace. The daughter, so far at least, clearly shares his disdain for British foible, but cannot sustain it; when she lapses into tolerance, the novel drags. Even so, Mirror reflects a provocative and steely talent.

THE MONEYCHANGERS

by ARTHUR HAILEY 472 pages. Doubleday. $10.

The latest novel off the Arthur Hailey assembly line tells the story of the First Mercantile American Bank. It is one of the 20 largest in the country, with its parent-branch office tower gleaming over a composite city in the Midwest. (A dirty river flows past the First Mercantile, and there are plenty of slums.) Following the death of wise and kindly F.M.A. President Ben Rosselli, two vice presidents personifying fiscal vice and fiscal virtue struggle for control.

Virtue believes in "the ancient verity of thrift" and wants to use the bank as a community resource. Vice (who comes equipped with a frigid wife and an effete son) cares only for profit. It is he who pushes a dangerously large loan to a multinational corporation at the expense of municipal bonds and local construction projects. Meanwhile, as background, Hailey provides a bank theft, a counterfeit-credit ring, extramarital affairs, race problems and a Robert Vescoesque corporate swindle.

The Moneychangers is well timed. In the past 18 months, three major U.S. banks have collapsed. The "watch list" kept by the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency on banks in need of special surveillance has later reached an alltime high of 150. The general reader, too, judging by the success of Martin Mayer's recent expose of banking (TIME, Jan. 20) is beginning to wonder if going systematically into debt is as prudential as it was once thought to be.

On balance, readers of The Moneychangers will come off encouraged. Fiscal virtue triumphs in the end and has the final words on finance as well. "Banks and the money system," he observes, "are like delicate machinery ... let one component get seriously out of hand because of greed or politics or plain stupidity, and you imperil all the others." Hailey apparently does not feel the same way about fiction. The insider's details that give his novel its texture simply bury its feeble literary qualities.

LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL CASTLE by JOSEPH and FRANCES GIES

272 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell. $7.95.

Castles are crumbly and romantic.

They still hint at an age more colorful and gallant than our own, but are often debunked by boring people who like to run on about drafts and grumble that the latrines did not work. Joseph and Frances Gies offer a book that helps set the record straight--and keeps the romance too.

The authors rightly approach the castle as the center of medieval life. Their story ranges well beyond the castle gate, but it centers on Chepstow, a well-preserved fortress on the Welsh border not far from Bristol. The 12th century lord of Chepstow, William Marshal, turns up with a companion knight on the tournament circuit in France. Touring the country like early-day golf pros, they clean up handsomely, accumulating scores and scores of horses and piles of armor in more than 100 contests.

In peaceable times, a medieval life had more civilized compensations than smug modern man imagines. Until the great castle halls fell into disuse, master and servant ate congenially in common. At table (regularly spread with fresh linen), two people often shared a bowl, helping themselves with fingers. But a strict etiquette governed the sharing, and hands and nails were expected to be scrupulously clean. Plumbing in the larger castles, the authors say, was better than that of 17th century Versailles: every floor had a washing area--some with running water, even baths. Latrines were often conveniently perched out over the castle moat.

The authors allow medieval man and woman to speak for themselves through selections from past journals, songs, even account books. With Gallic condescension, Peter of Blois, for example, wrote home about the wine served by King Henry II of England. It was, sneered Peter, "thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch."

THE PROMISE OF JOY

by ALLEN DRURY 445 pages. Doubleday. $10.

Allen Drury promises this will be the last of his Advise and Consent novels. That is a mercy. The author's comicbook view of humanity and reflex cold-war xenophobia, as well as the clothespins he calls characters and hangs out on his reactionary line, have long ceased to be amusing targets. Drury, in fact, somewhat resembles those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender in 1945 and spent 30 years with scorpions and coconuts.

History and politics are at least debatable. The Drury prose usually defies all discourse. It should be noted, however, that The Promise of Joy has nothing to do with cooking or sex. It is about a crisis during the first weeks of the presidency of Orrin Knox, whom Drury readers will remember as the Secretary of State in Advise and Consent, and a vice-presidential nominee in Capable of Honor. In this book Knox succeeds to the presidency after the assassination of Edward M. Jason, and he is called upon to decide nothing less than the fate of Western civilization. After a good deal of messy preliminaries, China and Russia go to war against each other. Atomic weapons devastate both countries, but the massive Chinese army advances despite horrendous losses. Drury describes the Chinese variously as "yellow hordes," "pagan hordes" and "mongrel hordes." Besides Knox, other holdover Drury characters taking a last bow include Secretary of State Robert Lessingwell, Commie-Symp Fred Van Ackerman, Columnist Walter Dobius and TV Commentator Frankly Unctuous.

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