Rise And Fall WINTER

By Paul Gray

Like fiddlers who want to conduct and comedians who yearn to play Hamlet, thriller writers sometimes show symptoms of hankering after respectability. John le Carre has handled this problem by surrounding his plots with a Jamesian density of details and implications. Now Len Deighton, known to millions of readers as the author of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, has, temporarily at least, given up suspense altogether.

Winter deals fictionally with the rise and fall, and then the rise and fall again, of Germany during the first 45 years of the 20th century. This vast subject is interesting in a number of ways, although a sense of surprise is not one of them; nearly everyone knows how World Wars I and II turned out. Deighton's purpose is not to astound but to explain. He meticulously traces the lives of two brothers, the sons of a wealthy Berlin financier and his beautiful American wife. Peter Winter is the elder by three years; Paul, born in 1900, is a "child of the new century." One brother, inevitably, will become a Nazi, while the other will not. In his prologue, Deighton warns that the Winter brothers "had lived through a series of episodes, most of which were frustrating and unsatisfactory."

The novel is considerably better than that bleak forecast promises. Certain scenes are vivid and memorable; a zeppelin raid over London achieves an eerie, horrifying beauty. And as the brothers' paths diverge in the 1920s, Deighton skillfully displays the tangled politics and passions that were leading Germany toward another disaster.

But characters burdened with the necessity of being typical have a hard time simply being themselves. Peter and Paul are so busy representing alternate responses to stimuli that they seem ganglions rather than real folks. Deighton can rarely resist the temptation to point out the big issues behind his narrative. He interrupts a scene of trench warfare with a sweeping comment on some of the combatants: "They were Germans, and their readiness to obey instructions was a measure of their civilization, and their tragedy."

Still, Winter is a relatively painless way to absorb a great deal of information. Those who feel guilty wasting their time on made-up stories can assuage their consciences with Deighton's exhaustive supply of names, dates and places that mattered. Or they might wait for the mini-series for which this sprawling novel seems tailor-made.