Current & Various

THE MULE ON THE MINARET by Alec Waugh. 506 pages. Farrar, Straus and G/'roux. $6.95.

The young half-Egyptian British captain was vain and foppish, and he was crazy about women. What rocked them back on their heels, he figured, was his dazzling smile--well, not his smile exactly, but his teeth. Superbly white and straight, they suggested strength and virility. So after careful consideration, British Intelligence chose the young officer for a secret mission to inform the Bulgarian underground that Turkey was entering the war on the Allied side and British troops were preparing to launch a massive attack through the Balkans. Then, through a double agent, news was leaked to the Germans that the young officer was carrying vital information and a dossier was supplied on his weakness. The Germans kidnaped the officer, and after they had yanked only two teeth, he broke down and blubbered the purpose of his mission. Thus, at a price of only two teeth, the British kept at least three German divisions pinned down in the Balkans--waiting for an attack that had never even been considered.

This intriguing little tale of wartime skulduggery, somewhat reminiscent of The Man Who Never Was, is a minor episode in Alec Waugh's rambling but always engrossing story about a British counterespionage unit in Beirut during

World War II. The officers are overage, the women bed-prone, but with part of their time and part of their minds, they feel themselves part of the war effort. Although they never hear a shot fired in anger, Waugh shows how war changes or destroys them all. In the end, Waugh's hero, a mild-mannered professor of history and philosophy in peacetime, still cannot decide whether it has all been worthwhile, but he consoles himself with an aphorism, which might also be the message of the book: "It's easy to be happy when you know that you never will be happy."

A CONSPIRACY OF WOMEN by Aubrey Menen. 244 pages. Random House. $4.95.

One day Alexander the Great put a question to his friend Hephaestion. "Hephaestion," he inquired, "have you ever thought about the fact that women make up half the human race?"

"Once," replied Hephaestion.

"And what did you think about it?" Alexander insisted.

"I thought it was a pity," said Hephaestion.

This catty little chat between two celebrated sissies of antiquity occupies the first seven lines of a new novel by Aubrey Menen, and suggests that the well-known Indo-Irish satirist (The Prevalence of Witches) has once again produced a witty, gritty demonstration of what grubby rogues and/or endearing fools most mortals be. What follows, unfortunately, is a limply whimsical succession of skits that describe how Alexander conquered the world but lost the war between men and women.

MORNING AND NOON by Dean Acheson. 288 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $6.

In this guarded memoir, dapper, frosty old Lawyer Dean Acheson recalls the great ones he has known and paints in muted, modest tones his career until the time he joined the State Department in 1941. He recalls a comfortably idyllic New England boyhood (his English-born father was Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut), his years as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, his practice with a Washington law firm. It is all consistently respectable and, alas, consistently unrevealing --except for one rewarding chapter on Under Secretary of the Treasury Acheson's squabble with F.D.R. The President's freewheeling economic policy offended Acheson's New England conservatism only slightly less than his flippant condescension to subordinates. "It is not gratifying," reports Acheson, "to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one's forelock in return." Pleading a desire for objectivity, he ends the memoir before his controversial years as President Truman's Secretary of State. From his earlier recollections he omits everything he considers "too unpleasant" or "too personal" to set down. In other words, all the interesting parts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.