A Rose Named Fanny

THE BATTLE OF THE VILLA FIORITA by Rumer Godden. 312 pages. Viking. $5.

There is evidence that the Book-ofthe-Month Club could not exist with out Rumer Godden. In the 24 years since she published Black Narcissus, she has provided B.O.M. with half a dozen of those soft-focus domesticated dra mas that brush across a reader's mind as soothingly as a summer breeze.

This time Author Godden, 55, is addressing herself to the woman in early middle age who has had her children, has become bored with her husband and feels parched for romance. Fanny Clavering, a suburban English housewife, will do nicely. One evening Fanny goes to a dinner party in honor of the members of a film company who have been shooting a picture on location in the village. In midmeal the film's darkly brooding director, Rob Quillet, leans across the table and murmurs, "Is there a rose named Fanny Clavering? If there isn't, there ought to be." Fanny's tinderdry heart goes up in flames.

For a while she fights it. She is, after all, the mother of three children in school, and she knows she is no beauty --greying, a little ungainly and inclined to weight. What does Rob, who is said to have a different woman with every picture, see in Fanny? "My work is exciting," explains Rob. "I need rest." Somehow that jells it. Fanny gets her divorce and decamps with Rob for a hideaway on the Italian lakes--the Villa Fiorita.

There the moppets find them. The first to arrive are Fanny's two youngest--Caddie, 11, and Hugh, 14--who have run away from England determined to bring Mommy home. They are joined by Pia, Rob's ten-year-old daughter by a former marriage. The rest of the novel recounts the precocious intrigues by which the three children try to break up the romance and restore their respective parents to their proper homes.

B.O.M. readers, who get the book this month, will find it as soothingly sentimental as its heroine--a woman who somehow never seems large enough for the emotions she is supposed to feel.

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