Bookends

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY

by Robert Ludlum

Random House; 597 pages; $19.95

Robert Ludlum knows what all successful storytellers and hamburger makers know: the public likes consistency. A Ludlum novel reads like a Ludlum novel, just as a Big Mac tastes like a Big Mac. The Bourne Supremacy is doubly familiar. The hairy-chested prose ("No man was a match for him; no eyes, no throat, no groin safe from an assault, swift and agonizing") and the conspiratorial plotting are stock Ludlum. So is the hero, Jason Bourne. Readers of The Bourne Identity (1980) will recognize him as the cover name for David Webb, the American Orientalist who was used to lure Carlos, the international terrorist known as the Jackal.

Now Webb is tricked into assuming his Bourne identity once again. His assignment this time: to track down an impostor threatening to plunge the Far East into war. The bait being dangled is Webb's equally scholarly wife Marie, who has been abducted by American agents and flown to Hong Kong, where much of the action takes place. It is all for the good of the country, though most of the way Webb and Marie find that hard to believe. So may readers. But credibility is hardly the point. Ludlum deals in male fantasies, and there are few two-fisted scribes with seven-figure advances who do it better.

ARCTIC DREAMS

by Barry Lopez

Scribner's; 464 pages; $22.95

For eons, the frozen north was terra incognita, the work of a mapmaker's imagination. Now it is the turn of writers to define its contours. The latest lyricist is Journalist Barry Lopez. "Much of the tundra," he notes, "appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees--a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering around on top of a forest." Icebergs the size of Cleveland drift through the dark waters, and sulfur butterflies mysteriously rise in the short, delirious summer. Mirages provide a weird history and geography: "A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus." In the author's luminous notes, the Eskimos, the animals and the landscape are components in a vast, unfinished epic. "The continuous work of the imagination," Lopez concludes, is "to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed." This merger is a crystalline triumph.

PERU

by Gordon Lish

Dutton; 222 pages; $15.95

In a sandbox, a six-year-old boy is attacked by a playmate wielding a toy rake. The child retaliates with a toy hoe, hacking his assailant to death. Nearly a half-century later, while seeing his son off to summer camp, the killer, grown to uneasy manhood, is accidentally hit with the lid of a taxi trunk; he bleeds profusely, and for a few minutes believes he is dying. These ) events merge in his mind with TV-news footage of prison violence in Peru: guards shooting inmates who are in the midst of stabbing one another. All these images commingle with recollections of passive, exhibitionistic childhood sex. That is virtually all that happens in Gordon Lish's Peru, an incantatory monologue of a novel. Even the murder may not have happened: police and psychiatrists figure nowhere in the narrative, as they would in the aftermath of a crime. Whether this slight, tightly focused book is a confession, a nightmare or a tease, its mesmeric voice requires, and rewards, a close reading.

GOOD MORNING BLUES: the

autobiography of count basie

as told to Albert Murray

Random House; 399 pages; $19.95

He was no charismatic front man. His piano playing, though inimitable, was hardly virtuoso stuff. But William ("Count") Basie had one supreme gift: he knew how to meld a dozen or more idiosyncratic instrumentalists into a single, pulsing organism with a voice of its own, which was always somehow his voice. The bluesy, stomping bands he led from the mid-1930s until his death in 1984, at age 79, were among the best in jazz history. Not that Basie makes any such claims in Good Morning Blues. On the page as in life, he is a modest man, given to understatement and sly humor, deft in turning the spotlight on others. He fondly evokes such colleagues as Thomas ("Fats") Waller and Lester Young, and he has a nice eye for after-hours vignettes. With the artful help of Collaborator Albert Murray (Stomping the Blues), he turns his early memories into a historically valuable account of the itinerant, raffish life of the black musician in the '20s and '30s. The Jim Crow working conditions provoke little bitterness. All he wanted, says the Count, was "to play music and have a ball." Basie and Murray get that spirit into their book, and now it is the reader who has the ball.