Books: Return to Pompey’s Head

THE LIGHT INFANTRY BALL (476 pp.)—Hamilton Basso—Doubleday ($4.50).

On the first page of this massive Civil War novel, Hero John Bottomley is up before dawn to fight a duel with villainous Ules Monckton. But he does not reach the dueling ground until page 143. having lost his way in a maze of flashbacks intended to introduce the reader to the large, and largely predictable, cast. There is the weak younger brother who breaks his stern daddy’s heart; the high-strung mother who fears a slave insurrection; the “giddy, harum-scarum” little sister; the coldly beautiful woman who spurns the hero and marries money; and inevitably, a willful, head-tossing, foot-stamping Southern belle named Arabella, who insults John Bottom-ley for 443 pages and then, with “the tears tangled in her thick eyelashes.” damply confesses that she has loved him all the while. John is stunned.

Gold Braid & Hoop Skirts. Author Basso. 54. is dealing with the same fictional South Carolina town that framed his 1954 bestseller. The View from Pompey’s Head, which told of present-day passions in the Tidewater South. The events of this new book are laid a century earlier but. despite the gold braid uniforms and the hoop skirts, the idiom is racily contemporary (says high-born Arabella of a suitor: “All he wanted was a chance to get under my skirts”).

Like earlier Hamilton Basso heroes. Plantation Owner John Bottomley is clearly derived from John P. Marquand. He is handsome but not terribly bright, brimful of ideals that make life difficult for him. Though often obstinate, he is invariably polite, and when older men say something nauseous, he answers “Yes, sir” in a mildly disapproving tone. When women quarrel, he never understands that they are quarreling about him. The girls are pure Marquand, too. always prattling merrily about nothing while the men brood, and when noble-souled John says something portentous to them, they respond with irrelevancies—”You need a haircut.”

Murder & Miscegenation. Though this is a Civil War novel, all the fighting takes place offstage, and the Yankee invaders are vehemently discussed but never seen. As the fortunes of the South decline, John Bottomley whips his jaded horse into a final gallop that gets him back to Pompey’s Head for a last big scene in which he accepts a dying Negro as his illegitimate half-uncle and watches the family mansion burn to the ground, consuming Villain Monckton in the process. Penniless, but at last united in wedlock. John and Arabella are prepared to face together the perils of Reconstruction—just as soon as Author Basso gets around to writing the third novel of his planned trilogy about Pomoey’s Head.

The Light Infantry Ball should fill a satisfactory number of evenings for readers interested in a leisurely tour of the war-torn Confederacy, complete with side trips into murder, miscegenation and skulduggery in the higher echelons of the rebel government.