The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 559

Timeless Core in Historical Fiction BY CECELIA HOLLAND barrassing domestic misunderstanding. A book by that title should be about Henry I of England, traditionally the Lion of Justice, but this story rehashes the controversy between Henry II Plantagenet and Thomas a Becket. Why would anybody want to bring up this again, after movies and plays and books and more books? Margaret Butler certainly adds nothing new. Her Henry and Becket don't realize what is happening and seem not to understand the obvious consequences of their own acts, which makes them look stupid, as well as shallow. Mostly they stand around and read each other's speeches.

Many of these books contain lengthy bibliographies. "The Iron Crown," by Claire Barroll, reads like a book assembled from bits of other books. Subtitled "a novel of the Vikings and Byzantium," it is a travelogue of the Viking world of the 11th century, from the stormy Hebrides to the edge of Asia. Enough of it is interesting to make me wish she had focused her story rather more narrowly. As it is, there is too much and too little here to make a book.

"Wife to the Kingmaker" by Sandra Wilson, "My Lady Bernbook" by Constance Gluyas and "My Dear Lover England" by Pamela Bennetts are conventional novels of the historical type, depending on a lot of research. The evidence of this appears in many passages that sound like excerpts from Women's Wear Daily. "Underneath she wore an undergown of white satin stitched with myriads of pearls Her black hair was pushed beneath a high, horseshoe headdress of gold satin over which was drapec a training veil of white lace." Some of the characters do nothing except wear clothes. "Wife to the Kingmaker" is about the Wars of the Roses. Wilson's sympathies are Yorkist; her book is more about Richard Neville, whom she obviously admires, than his high-spirited wife.

"My Dear Lover England" is about the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Both books are sensibly written, but the distance The Flame of the Borgias by Jean Briggs (Harper Row. $8.95) The Lion of Justice by Margaret Butler (Coward McCann Geoghegan; $7.95) The Iron Crown by Claire Barroll (Scribner's: $10) My Lady Benbrook by Constance Gluyas (Prentice-Hall: $7.95) My Dear Lover England by Pamela Bennetts (Saint Martin's: $6.95) Wife lo the Kingmaker by Sandra Wilson (Saint Martin's $6.95) Lady of Monkton by Elizabeth Byrd (Stein Day: $7.95) The best historical fiction may be set in the past, but it is not about the past at all. A novel like "Kristin Lav-ransdatter" or "War and Peace" or a play like "Hamlet" allows us to reenter our own times from another perspective, to get a long view of something that otherwise is too close to the eye to see. The wise novelist can also use the form of the historical novel to avoid the fixation with style that makes so much new writing difficult to read.

The "public" or historical aspect of the story can support those considerations of convention that style deals with, while the writer is free to develop her own personal concerns through her characters. Of these seven novels, those work best that develop this private, interior and perhaps ahistorical world of the characters. "The. Flame of the Borgias" is explicitly about the conflict between the public and private lives of the hero and heroine. Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, is married to the heir to the Duke of Ferrara.

Pietro Bembo, that same Bembo who figures in Castiglione's "The Courtier," is unwillingly involved in the politics of his native Venice and his wealthy family. He and Lucrezia fall in love. Under the eyes of their enemies, they contrive to meet, to talk and to enjoy one another, without being discovered and destroyed. In this first novel, Jean Briggs handles her cantilev-ered plot and sophisticated characters like a writer of much experience. The book starts slowly, but the reader who gives it the chance will find it absorbing.

Margaret Butler seem to be muddling through an em sown by Lawrence David Kusche Keep up with today's world. Read Opinion every weekend with The Los Angeles Times. It's where local, national and international leaders take a stand on the issues and events shaping the active, changing world around us. between a reader and the past doesn't close by much in either. "My Lady Benbrook" is just silly: a gutless "Forever Amber." To make it worse, it is printed in a small cramped type face which makes reading torturous.

None of these six books goes exploring. Most stick very close to orthodox historical ideas. "The Flame of the Borgias" is a good, honest novel, but it seems to agree with Machiavelli, a contemporary of its characters, that human nature cannot change, that time makes no difference in human affairs and history is an illusion. "Lady of Monkton," by Elizabeth Byrd, is a much bolder piece of work. Like so many of these books, it concerns a secret love affair, but unlike any of the others, its theme is the effects of time.

Fourteen-year-old Cathryn Grandison marries a man she has never seen. Because he is away on his business, she marries him by proxy of his sword, a funny little piece of metal made especially for the ceremony, and settles down at his home of Monkton to wait for his return. But time passes, and in her curiosity about her husband and her efforts to build a life for herself in this strange place, among strange people, the child grows and changes. She makes choices, and she lives with them, and by the time her husband comes home, his bride is a mature woman. The marriage in which she began as a chattel must be reworked to a relationship in which she has room and strength to act, her own woman.

The novel is set in Lowland Scotland in 1460. Cathryn belongs here, in the little world devised by Elizabeth Byrd's shrewd imagination. The heroine's problems are not entirely modern ones, and they are not modernly solved. The key character in the novel is a man who describes himself as "the link between past and present." He is a traveler in time, and in his company, I went there and back again. Holland is a historical novelist whose most recent book is "The Firedrake" (Ballentine).

Exhaustive research has at last led to the solution of one of today's most haunting mysteries. The author, a librarian at Arizona State University, has spent many months in trying to find out about the strange disappearances in that area in the Atlantic Ocean called the Bermuda Triangle. What he uncovered is eye-opening and will make this book one of the most talked-about of the season. With 32 maps; 24 halftones; bibliography; index. $10.00 HARPER ROW B.

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