The Long Wait

HIGH TOWERS (403 pp.)--Thomas B. Costain--Doubleday ($3).

After nibbling at High Towers, a reader might well conclude that Author Costain, who is an old hand at whipping up best-selling bonbons about the past (The Black Rose; The Moneyman), no longer has his heart in his work. In this surprisingly sedate historical romance, little blood is spilled, the solitary battle is brief and tame, and not a single damsel is seduced.

With the speed and grace of an old dray horse, High Towers creaks along with the meandering story of the mighty Le Moyne family which settled in Montreal in the 17th Century, profited from the fur trade, drove the English out of Hudson's Bay, intrigued at the French court and created New Orleans. It is also a tears-and-sugar romance about Felicite and Philippe, humble hangers-on of the Le Moyne household whose love is frustrated by French colonial policy.

Toward the end Author Costain tries to liven things up a bit. Felicite is dragged by her ankles, with her pretty thighs exposed, by her brutal nobleman husband whom she has been forced to marry, is beaten by him with a cudgel "not thicker than a man's thumb," and is kidnaped by Indians. This, presumably, is what readers of this kind of novel have been waiting for, but it is a long wait, and they are in for further dull stretches before virtue and justice at last prevail.

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