Worthy of Sir Walter

THE GOLDEN HAND (501 pp.]--Edith Simon--Putnam ($4).

It takes something more than the drugstore magic of the ordinary historical novel to wake the dead. Once in a long while a writer finds the prescription, and brings the past to life in a fine historical novel. This week one of the best in many a month is being published in the U.S.

The Golden Hand is the fifth novel by Edith Simon, the wife of a research chemist at the University of Edinburgh. It tells the story of 53 years (1347-1400) in the life of an imaginary English village called Bedesford--its births, feasts, miracles, wars, witches, lepers, plagues, rapes, murders, floods; and its common talk, small superstitions and deep-breathing faith; the wild downs and dark woods around it; all the kinds of people, from bondman to merchant to lord bishop, who filled out its vivid society; and the great cathedral they all built in the waste. It is, in brief, something like a total recall of 14th century England, told in the violent shape of mass adventure, with a quiet detail of individual tragedy.

Witch & Minster. At the core of the book is a miracle. While digging the foundation for a new Franciscan cloister, young Edwin Widowson unearths a queer, antique fist of pure gold. The friars set a guard to it, but the next night Edwin, persuaded by outlaws, filches the treasure and leaves in its place the hand of his brother, who has been hanged. "Miracle!" cry the good friars in the morning.

The hand soon begins to work impossible cures, and the lord bishop decides to erect a cathedral on the spot of its discovery. The whole village dedicates itself to the labor--and to his horror, guilty Edwin, a gifted woodcutter, becomes the chief decorator of this colossal memorial to his lie. As the great minster rises in the wold, Edwin is condemned, by a keen irony, to give his life to its embellishment.

About this inward theme of guilt and redemption rages the outward action of the book. In 1348 the Black Death tore through Bedesford like a cyclone; fewer than a third of the townsfolk survived. Then came the plague of the fallow deer and the flood of the Wode. Yet Edwin and Jeanne, Jack and Joan, Alfred and Juliana went on working and breeding, and soon the fields were up to mark again and the population almost normal.

In this time a witch came to town as a bondwoman to the wool merchant's widow. She was a Norse girl, a beauty with "great, sea-grey eyes" and hair "unbelievably golden"; her name was Swan Ygern. Swan healed the Lord Cinqmort of a bloody flux, and so becharmed his wicked soul that he even left off his wenching to eat her beetle puddings under the Weird Oak Tree. She gave her mistress' daughter the dread effigy of St. Uncumber--to whom unwilling wives prayed that he uncumber them of their mates--and when the poor husband failed to die, cast on him the botch of leprosy. She died at last in the lord's dungeons, suffocating herself by packing her nose with earth and swallowing her lips.

Spire & Whirlpool. The death of the witch did not bring peace to Bedesford. As the cathedral rose toward its spire, other forces in England were working toward a fateful leveling. The wretchedness of bondsmen, the idle viciousness of the nobility, the predaceousness of churchmen, the rise of a small, jealous class of tradesmen--these converged in the whirlpool of the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

The revolt failed, but the people of Bedesford, depleted, confused, unbreakable, went on living and building their cathedral.

Their tale, an epic in substance, takes on a lyric grace and pageant color in Author Simon's telling. The Golden Hand is worthy of the master of historical fiction himself, Sir Walter Scott. And it is often rich where Scott is poor--in the homely detail of ordinary scenes and natural activity.

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