Bull Market

CARAVANS by James A. Michener. 341 pages. Random House. $5.95.

James A. Michener has risen above mere writing to become an economic phenomenon. His twelve books have sold over 9,000,000 copies; seven movies have been made from his work. He created one television series, which ran for three seasons (Adventures in Paradise), and South Pacific made him the most successful single by-product of Rodgers and Hammerstein. If Michener went public, his 1963 annual report would be bullish. Caravans, his seventh novel, is a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, is being condensed in the Ladies' Home Journal (for $50,000), and has already been picked up by Hollywood for $500,000.

At his best, as in Tales of the South Pacific, Michener evokes a sense of place and exotic atmosphere and, as in the opening pages of Hawaii, comes close to poetry. At his worst, he writes prose comic strips that combine the emotional depth of Mary Worth and the flavor of Terry and the Pirates. Caravans belongs to the latter category.

The scene is Afghanistan in 1946, where Russia and the U.S. are vying for influence in a country still ruled in spirit, if not in fact, by the reactionary mullahs. Bands of wolves prowl openly through the unpaved streets of the capital city of Kabul (pronounced cobble). Native women are seldom seen out of doors, and Western women who appear in the bazaar without wearing a veil are attacked and spat upon.

To the U.S. embassy in Kabul comes an urgent State Department order to locate Ellen Jaspar, a Bryn Mawr junior who has run off and married an Afghan engineer named Nazrullah. Thirteen months have passed since Ellen had last written her parents back home in Dorset, Pa. The task of finding the missing girl falls to Mark Miller, a junior embassy officer fluent in Pashto, the native language.

Trying to pick up Ellen's trail, Miller picks up instead a mysterious German doctor named Stiglitz, who turns out to be a fleeing Nazi war criminal. Eventually they track down Nazrullah at a damsite near the ancient city of Qala Bist. But Nazrullah seems more concerned with building Afghanistan's future than with his wife's whereabouts. Ellen, after all, was only Wife No. 2.

In a deserted caravan stop, Miller finally finds Ellen tenting up with a nomad chief. Ellen, it seems, is almost congenitally roundheeled, and soon she is making eyes first at Stiglitz and then at Mark. The nomad leader does not hesitate to turn all three out into the desert but kindly sends along his young daughter to keep Mark's bedroll warm. At last this motley caravan reaches safety; Stiglitz is arrested, and Ellen is sent back home to Dorset.

Caravans shows more research than imagination. Michener studs his skimpy narrative with Afghan legends and interminably breathless descriptions of the sere and bleak Afghan landscape. All he succeeds in doing is making Afghanistan seem like Hawaii West.

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