Mettlesome Magyar

RAKOSSY by Cecelia Holland. 243 pages. Atheneum. $5.75.

The old adage, "He who has a Hungarian for a friend does not need an enemy," may well be a national slander, but it proves true enough in the case of Janos Rakossy, the tough, devious hero of this historical novel. The Hungarians were latecomers to Western Europe, drifting in from southern Russia in the 9th century, and they were so often friendless that it is a wonder they lasted at all. Rakossy is set in one of the worst times of trouble for the Magyars--when Suleyman the Magnificent and his Turkish Janissaries swept up through the Balkans in 1525 and made pilaff of the Hungarian chivalry at the battle of Mohacs. The Magyars were beaten so swiftly that Suleyman at first refused to believe he had really met and destroyed the national army of Hungary.

Novelist Holland's hero helps explain the Magyar weakness. The great Baron Rakossy and the other lords have just crushed a peasant rebellion and are now squabbling with each other. Rakossy has his eye on Catharine de Bunez, who is related to the Habsburg emperor, and he gets her; for good measure, he seduces her sister and slays her brother-in-law. He also has his eye on the neighboring castle of Vrath and gets it as well, by trickery rather than force of arms. By this time, not only the peasants are muttering that Rakossy must have a pact with Satan. But Rakossy is directly in the route of the Turkish invasion, and in two splendid battle pieces, his own castle and Vrath are stormed by the Turks. As sole survivor, Rakossy hunts down and kills a final Magyar enemy and then rides mindlessly to his own death against Turkish cavalry.

Although Hungarian history is studded with Rakossys (the most celebrated led a revolt against Austria in the 18th century), this particular baron is fictional. Still, the character and the story have the ring of authenticity. Author Holland got her expertise at the Connecticut College for Women, where she specialized in the Hungarian Renaissance, but there is more in her book than research. As in her fine first novel, Firedrake (TIME, Feb. 18), Cecelia Holland writes a spare, masculine prose and applies the technique of the good U.S. western to her feudal lords. She avoids the stage-prop flummery that clutters so many historical novels, and in her dialogue she steers a middle course between the "Prithee, m'lord" school and modern idiom. Most surprising of all, she is only 23 years old.

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