Royal Flush

By Paul Gray

THE ABANDONED WOMAN by RICHARD CONDON 317 pages. Dial. $8.95.

When novelists take liberties with historical events, they have a pat defense: if things did not happen that way, they should have. In embroidering upon the stormy marriage between the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and Caro line of Brunswick, Novelist Richard Condon takes this defense and stands it on its head. If things did not happen to the real people involved as they are described in The Abandoned Woman, so much the better for them.

Condon's 15th novel is a brittle comedy of bad manners. His prince is a dissolute leech on the public treasury who agrees to marry his German cousin only because Parliament will then begin to cover his royal debts. After meeting his intended, the prince whines that he is "going to have to live with that smelly thing for the rest of my life." In a characteristic gesture, he appoints his current mistress as Caroline's lady of the bedchamber. For her part, Caroline quickly takes the cut of the prince's jib and calls him a "slobbering, drunken, effeminate pig."

Public Affection. The emissaries who manufactured this marriage should have recalled it. Instead, husband and wife set out on a pitched battle that lasts some 25 years. The prince wants to flush Caroline out of his life. Her goal is "the mental and physical destruction of my husband and the eventual isolation from him of all public affection." Politicians come to this party, the Whigs siding with the prince in the hopes of discrediting George III and the Tories. The prince spurs an investigation to show that Caroline is guilty of adultery. Cagily, she gives her pursuers ample suspicion but no proof.

Condon treats these complicated forces as if they all added up to the mechanism of a cuckoo clock. The characters pop in and out of beds and public favor with predictable but amusing regularity. Condon's style, which has seemed preachy and sodden in recent years, achieves some of the snap and malice that enlivened such earlier works as The Oldest Confession and The Manchurian Candidate. Caroline, he writes, "tends to overdress except at the bod ices, which are cut so low, the gossip goes, that one can see the top of Sir Sid ney Smith's head." Or, with more subtlety: "She sets her own fashions in dress and, in consequence, introduces the smirk to British society."

Sharp Edge. In a note at the be ginning, Condon warns that "this is not a history." In a note at the end, he insists that except for several fictional characters and situations, "the rest is starkest history as it was lived." Both statements cannot be true, but it hardly matters. The Abandoned Woman is nei ther a profound distortion of the record nor a historical expose, but rather an act of literary sword swallowing. It is a tale with plenty of sharp edge and no vis ible point. sbPaul Gray

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