Leapin' Lizard

By Paul Gray

THE SALAMANDER by MORRIS WEST 355 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

A neo-Fascist Italian general is found stiff as a pillar in his Roman bed.

Assigned to tidy up the death, Colonel Dante Alighieri Matucci of the Service for Defense Information quickly wades waist-deep into a gooey pasta of conspiracy. What about the mysterious calling card--and the heraldic salamander inscribed on it--found under the general's bed? What if Matucci's own boss, the country's security chief, is actually part of a right-wing plot figureheaded by the dead general? What if a second apprentice tyrant is being groomed in the wings for a colpo di stato?

Poor Colonel Matucci has the devil's own time getting to the bottom of all this. All of his informants are voluble expositors from the "How is your father, the Archduke?" school of dialogue. Matucci's tiniest queries elicit encyclopedic replies. Matucci is also afflicted with an odd syntactic ataxia that makes his English sound like an American's idea of Italian. Thus handicapped, Matucci loses his struggles with metaphors ("A new conviction was crystallizing out of the murky fluid of my own thoughts").

Small wonder then that Matucci feels badly used by his superiors. His most entertaining manipulator is the Salamander himself--an old, immensely rich fairy Godfather. Like the legendary salamander who lives in flame, he has survived the fires of illegitimacy and Mussolini's Fascism with his lizard's skin unscathed. The Salamander does for West's story what the wolf does for the tale of Red Riding Hood. As a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, The Salamander will be widely sold, but it reads like a mere shadow between West's conception and the inevitable movie. It is hard not to conclude that somewhere film technicians are already at work outfitting a chameleon with an asbestos costume. Paul Gray

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