Wrong Assignment

THE DIPLOMAT (631 pp.)--James Al-drldge--Little, Brown ($3.75).

By the time he was 24, Australian-born James Aldridge had written about World War II from seven fronts, picked up three wounds and was a big-name correspondent. He had also written a novel, Signed with Their Honor (TIME, Oct. 5, 1942), which was clumsy fiction and embarrassingly indebted to Hemingway, but good reporting about war in the air. His second novel, The Sea Eagle, made it plain that not even the most studious aping of Hemingway was enough to make a novelist out of a newspaperman. With The Diplomat, it should by now be obvious even to his publishers that Author Aldridge ought to get back to straight reporting.

The Diplomat is the story of a diplomatic mission to Moscow and Iran in 1946. Lord Essex, ace British negotiator who works over the heads of embassies, is trying to talk the -Russians out of supporting a revolution in the province of Azerbaijan. His objectives: to safeguard British oil in Iran, check Russian expansion, keep a friendly government in power in Teheran. Cagey operator though he is, Essex has been careless enough to select as his assistant a man he has never seen before, Geologist Ivre MacGregor, an uncommunicative Scot who grew up in Iran. It is a choice that plagues and defeats him. Mac not only sympathizes with the revolution and gives the Russians a bill of health; he also cops sophisticated Kathy Clive from under the very nose of Essex, who had her all earmarked for himself. At the end, Mac's hope for civil war in Iran is somewhat dashed, but he has just to fight and Kathy is his.

The Diplomat moves airily about from Moscow to Iran to London, casually drags in Stalin, Vishinsky and Molotov as if they were handy stage extras, uses embassies and the halls of Parliament as if they were interchangeable stage props, Lord Essex, half Blimpish charlatan, half rhesterfieldian dandy, is too close to caricature to convince even a reader of Pravda. MacGregor is too churlish, too slow-witted to be anyone's hero, let alone that of a sharp gal-of-all-embassies like Kathy Clive. Whatever a reader's politics, he may well be puzzled by the publisher's announcement that they consider the novel "the most important book about the most important man [the diplomat] in the world today."

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