Books: Suitable for Framing

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HARLEQUIN by MORRIS WEST 324 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

"The stem of the wineglass snapped in his fingers and the liquor spilled like blood on the white napery," Morris West reports at a tense moment in this thriller about international banking. The sentence tells most of what the prospective thrillee needs to know about Harlequin. Not very long after the invention of the novel, literature divided into two mighty streams, one in which wineglass-stem snapping during moments of tension was impermissible and another in which it was obligatory. Admirers of one stream do not go boating on the other.

Those inclined to press on regardless of what spills on the napery will have no trouble imagining a dashing Swiss banker named George Harlequin. He is a master of eight or ten languages and all women who see him, he plays a Spanish guitar passably, and in matters relating to Eurodollars he is a past master. But as the novel begins, he lies ill and helpless in a Los Angeles hospital.

Enter the villain, Basil Yanko, a Yankee basilisk whose mysterious firm, Creative Systems, runs Harlequin's computer operations. He makes two announcements to Paul Desmond, Harlequin's loyal aide: 1) he is prepared to buy out Harlequin, for a suspiciously high figure, and 2) computer print-outs show that Harlequin himself has embezzled $15 million from his own company. It is clear, of course, that Yanko and his minions (this is the sort of novel in which the villain has minions) have framed Harlequin. But can this be proved to the international banking community? And what about Yanko's known ties to Arab oil money?

Harlequin's man Desmond abruptly finds himself plotting with and against a variety of thugs, terrorists, secret Israeli agents and FBI blue-suits for control of a large chunk of the globe's financial power. Terror seems to have become an ordinary, accepted tool of commerce and diplomacy. Or should that be reversed: Have diplomacy and commerce become tools of political terror?

Because West is a romantic, everything works out cozily in the end. That is to say, the plot is tidied up, despite a few corpses lying about, and most of the good guys live wealthily ever after. The untidy questions about terror, commerce and diplomacy remain, and the disappointing feeling arises that the author was not really serious in bringing them up. Had his eye been bleaker, his novel would have been better.

John Skow