The Morning After

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY by Sarah Gainham. 371 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

Two years ago, an unheralded novel called Night Falls on the City became a surprise bestseller in England and America. The city was Vienna during its long eclipse from the Anschluss to the Russian occupation in 1945. The book's scenes shifted with enough suspense to satisfy Dickens himself; its characters were successful artists, intellectuals, politicians. Yet much of the novel's appeal came from Sarah Gainham's portrait of the city itself and a settled, civilized society slowly being corrupted, within and without, by the poisonous fear and protective selfishness unleashed by the Nazi presence.

Night Falls on the City, it turns out, was the first part of an intended trilogy. Gainham's new book covers the postwar years until 1951. This time, unfortunately, she has broken the narrative rules she seemed to have mastered in the first book. She picks up two of her best characters, Actress Julia Homburg and Newspaper Editor Georg Kerenyi. But as if no longer trusting them to carry the story, she has invented a tepid narrator, a British security officer named Robert Inglis, and laid on a mystery-writer's plot that turns out to be a fictional version of Donald Maclean's 1951 flight to Russia.

Early in the book, Inglis witnesses enough questionable behavior in a colleague to warrant an urgent report. Instead, by vacillating and torturing his conscience, he manages to avoid any action until after page 300. "You're so bloody subtle, Robert," grumbles another character. But Robert, for all his interlocking scruples, is like one of Jane Austen's sensibility-struck young girls, finally a figure of fun.

Though her picture is on the jacket, Sarah Gainham follows the vogue for pen names. She is really Rachel Ames, a successful mystery writer and the wife of an American journalist based in Central Europe. In the first volume of her trilogy she graduated from the rigors of a hackneyed suspense plot; for the moment she has regressed. The third volume will flash back to Julia Homburg's early career in Vienna's Burgtheater, a more likely subject than cold war soul-searching for the novel of manners the author does best.

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