Books: Pop War

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Pop War GORE AND IGOR by Meyer Levin. 315 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

THE TOWER OF BABEL by Morris L. West. 361 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

The Arab-Israeli eruption of last June was a pop war, unless you happened to be an Arab or an Israeli, and a pop war novel about it is a provocation no truce commission could have been expected to prevent. Meyer Levin (Compulsion) has fired off a rooty-tooty, pot-woozy, never-trust-anyone-whose-eyes-still-focus novel about how it wasn't in the Sinai campaign.

Levin's principals are Gore Taylor, a young American protest singer, and Igor Mikhailovitch, a young Russian protest poet, who meet in Israel as the Six-Day War is about to start. So Gore drives this fantastic ambulance, and Igor fixes a Russian tank captured from the Arabs. They become great buddies, of course, while a lot of studs get their brains shot out. But mainly, the war as here described amid all this profound Israeli scenery is like everybody squirting beer on each other at a fraternity picnic. All the action moves along double time, like a fast-motion film; everything is jerky, smaller than human. With so much motion, there is no time for motive. War, sex, poetry and friendship demand some viewpoint from the author. Levin supplies none.

A companion volume of sorts is The Tower of Babel, a spy novel about Middle East tensions in the period just before the Six-Day War; it has no faults except that it is neither tense nor in any way Middle Eastern. The wily Lebanese banker, the fanatic Syrian colonel, the Israeli undercover agent and his trusty Damascan mistress all speak as if their lines had been written for them by—to pick an absurd example—a plonking Australian novelist named Morris West, author of The Shoes of the Fisherman. This is Eric Ambler territory, and no Western writer less accustomed to its rigors should go out in the Mideast sun.