Household Hints

ARABESQUE (312 pp.)--Geoffrey Household--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Geoffrey Household is an Englishman with a quiet gift for telling tales. He made a success in 1939 with a story about a big game hunter's attempt to stalk Hitler with telescopic sights. After that book, Rogue Male,* he went to the Near East as an intelligence officer, seeing action in Greece and intrigue in Syria and Palestine.

Arabesque is mainly a pleasantly concocted adventure story. A bilingual beauty named Armande Herne, stranded in Beirut in 1941, piques the curiosity of both French and British Intelligence. Odd though it seems, she is neither a poule de luxe nor a Nazi agent--just a lonely woman. No sooner have the security police made certain of this than they succeed in putting ideas in her pretty head: she should use her charm to strike a blow for Britain.

The serpentine affair into which this innocent adventuress lightly steps takes her to a Lebanese mountain village, then to Jerusalem and to Cairo. Sardonic Sergeant Prayle of British Field Security tails her with amusement, with concern, and finally with love. Along the way the reader is treated to crisp descriptions of an ancient and holy landscape, of types ranging from a touchy Gaullist officer to an Orthodox archimandrite and his mistress.

Near the end of the novel a Jewish terrorist pointlessly murders the most powerful and fervent of the older Zionists--a man who had sworn that Jews would never kill Britons. Arabesque, like the Middle East adventure stories that Eric Ambler spins, is no great shakes as a work of art, but it manages, along with romance, a dispassionate little picture of the way the tide was running toward the recent desperate events in Palestine.

* Which became the movie Man Hunt.

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