Decline & Fall

THE DARK ANGEL (374 pp.)--Mika Waltari--Putnam ($3.75).

Five hundred years ago last week, the Turkish Sultan Mohammed II rolled up his artillery and scaling ladders for one of the most decisive battles ever fought--the final assault on Christian Constantinople. Inside the battered city, Emperor Constantine XI, last of the 1,000-year-old Byzantine line, delivered a speech to his followers which Historian Edward Gibbon was to call "the funeral oration of the Roman Empire."

Mika Waltari, one of the most successful of practicing historical novelists (The Egyptian, The Wanderer), has taken this most crucial of all sieges as the subject of hs new book. It is both a lush and a tricky subject, combining the excitement of a historic military occasion with the far-reaching complications of the death of a great Christian state. It is a tribute to Waltari that he succeeds not only in blending the glamour and the disaster of the event but also works in the sort of love story on which, as every historical novelist knows, the fate both of book sales and besieged cities depends.

Most of Waltari's characters are drawn straight from the history books. Those who are not are made to look as if they were by the simple device of being made relatives of the authentic ones. Gorgeous Heroine Anna Notaras, who is a sort of Greek Joan of Arc with painted toenails, is the dubbed-in daughter of history's Grand Duke Lukas Notaras. Her would-be lover, John Angelos, another Waltari creation, is depicted as the rightful heir to the Byzantine throne.

All the wheels-within-wheels complications of war, love and treachery would have stalled a clumsy novelist. But Novelist Waltari is anything but clumsy. Dramatically and lavishly, he paints in the spectacular background--the campfires of the approaching Turks lining the night horizon, the arrival of their army ("a huge, living carpet seemed to cover the earth"), the roar and hiss of the foundries relentlessly churning out the Sultan's culverins and giant bombards. At first, the massive walls of Constantinople seem little affected; then telltale lines begin to streak down the masonry, widening into fundamental fractures and splits. In these splits lies a Waltari message, i.e., that when Christians become divided, as did the Greek and Roman churches, their schism can lead to disasters beyond repair.

With considerable skill, Novelist Waltari parallels the fall of Constantinople with the fall of gorgeous Anna. For much of the book, he keeps his readers on the hooks, trying to guess which surrender will come first. Constantinople, as any practical reader could guess, holds out just a bit longer than Anna.

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