A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

This is a sequel to Miss Gainham's BOM Night Falls On the City which was Vienna during World War II. While less of a story (less of it too, this is only half as long) some of the characters of the earlier book reappear: notably Julia Homburg, the actress, of numinous quality, ""her beauty . . . worked out, as it were, to its full nobility and charged with the contents of her life like a bowl brimming over its lip with a dark, vivid wine."" Now that the war is over, Miss Gainham has much less activity going for her although in the first inset (the '40's) an atmosphere of suspicion and surveillance still prevails. During this time, Robert Inglis, the narrator, stays at Julia's ""place in the country"" where he falls in love with Lali von Kasda and where he is first uneasy about another Allied officer, David Stephenson. In the second half he is married to Lali, and when Stephenson, now a diplomat, returns for an aggressive, drunken evening, Inglis recognizes his potential as a traitor and a destroyer. That's about it--not much more than say Martha Albrand and for that market--yesterday's champagne for others to the manner Hochgeborn.