Books: Costume Novels

THE SUN IS MY UNDOING—Marguerite Steen—Viking ($3).

In the endless stream of endless picaresque costume novels that sprang from the huge success of Anthony Adverse (1,224 pages) and Gone With the Wind (1,037 pages), this one has two distinctions. It is one of the longest (1,176 pages) and it is Viking’s first gamble with this gargantuan species. Being in other respects no better and no worse than other imitators, it spreads sail before some of the steadiest book-trade-winds that blow.

Its hero, Slave Trader Matthew Flood, is built like a souped-up Abraham Lincoln and is as tough, lascivious and predatory as Rhett Butler. Its heroine, Pallas Burmester, is an Abolitionist and a sort of vanguard feminist, but she is also a woman of spirit and of adequate sex appeal. The settings—Bristol, the African Gold Coast, Cuba, Spain, of the late 18th Century—exude that wasted “authenticity” of the Hollywood superproduction. Added attractions: informative data about the slave trade, some warm stuff about a Negro concubine, vignettes of convent and plantation life, a storm at sea, litigations over an estate, miscegenations, a few discreet garlic-whiffs of incest.