High Latitudes: A Romance

Buchan, who has won notable literary prizes in England for A Parish of Rich Women and The Golden Plough, is a showy writer who has set himself here a rather difficult task: create a novelettish plot out of the sort of characters who people sex-and-shopping potboilers, yet give the whole a high literary gloss. As he puts it himself, in one of those long asides to the reader, he wanted, among other things, to ""bridge the chasm between commerce and literature in our country."" What he has produced is a sort of upmarket fairy tale whose princess is Jane Haddon, brought up in direst circumstances, who becomes a millionaire CEO of a mammoth textile company, able to plot elaborate corporate takeovers with a few moments' thought. She was once married to glamorous aristocrat Johnny Bellarmine, who, in the tradition of an illustrious ancestor explorer, gets himself lost in the Antarctic. Another plot line concerns Jane's efforts to rescue an underperforming factory of sentimental value and her resulting conflict with an elderly Communist unionist who tries to blackmail her about her past. Yet another treats her affair with Stephen Cohen, another wealthy manipulator who eats columns of figures for breakfast. All this is set forth in prose of high style but considerable self-consciousness beset with countless references that only upwardly mobile people in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain would be likely to grasp. (Nov.)