BOOK REVIEW : A Dashing Tale of WWII Leaves You Breathless

Cold Harbour By Jack Higgins (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 318 pages.

Open the pages of “Cold Harbour” and you’re a goner for the next five hours. Jack Higgins takes you back to World War II, Europe before D-Day, when all the women wore red lipstick and silk stockings, when every uniform on every side was utterly becoming.

It was a time, when, as a matter of course, everybody thought to be dressed up like somebody else, so that, for instance, Craig Osborne, our American intelligence hero, gets to dress up for a daring rescue, “immaculate in the black dress uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the French Charlemagne Brigade of the Waffen SS.”

And who’s Craig rescuing costumed like that (a damsel locked up in the Chateau de Voincourt, in occupied France, at a shindig for Gen. Rommel himself)? Who’s in big trouble in her clinging gown? Genevieve Trauvance, who, up until a week ago, was drably doing good deeds in England, but, due to the overriding necessity for the English to win the war, has been shipped over to France to impersonate her hard-hearted, ruthless, double-agent twin sister, Anne-Marie Trauvance, putative heir to the Chateau, and the title of Countess, and whatever else there is around in the way of woods and livestock, and all because Anne-Marie was born 11 minutes earlier than Genevieve.

But Anne-Marie has been put out of commission by either a band of marauding Nazi sex-fiends, or a double-agent, mad-scientist, allegedly working for our side, who may have overdosed her on a brand-new truth serum they hadn’t quite got the kinks out of yet. . . .

How do Genevieve Trauvance and Craig Osborne get from England over to the French Coast so that they can socialize with Gen. Rommel at the chateau? Well, a very nice man called Martin Hare, (who’s already been through hell in the Solomon Islands), is recruited by a ruthless, English sociopath to run a captured German “Fast Boat” in which the whole English crew wears German uniforms, and speaks fluent German, including Martin Hare who also speaks fluent German, because his mother was German, and every character in this book is fluent in two and usually three languages, so fluent, that no one ever says, “Isn’t that an American accent you’ve got there (or German, English, French)?”

Add to all this a pretty little village in Cornwall where every English man and woman is dressed up like a German, and the food is magnificent because of a wonderful little trooper named Julie who makes steak and kidney pie for the English officers, and pate and rack of lamb for the French, and every room in this lovely coastal town is “very pleasant,” with floor-to-ceiling book shelves, and expensive Chinese rugs, and molded plaster ceilings, and pianos where Genevieve Trauvance can sit down and belt out “Claire de Lune” with feeling, and you’ve got a pretty special setup.

It’s World War II. And everybody actually does go around saying, “I know you! Class of Harvard, ‘39!” Who wouldn’t want to live in that world? Where can we sign up? It doesn’t even matter what side we’re on, because we’ll be dressing up like the other side anyway!

Now, Jack Higgins is sure to remind us every 10 pages or so that war is hell. There’s Anne-Marie Trauvance, for instance, totally twigged and out of her gourd, locked up in the nursing home basement. And our hero’s fingernails have grown in all crooked because the Huns pulled them out with pliers the last time he was in prison. But, listen! Anne-Marie broke Genevieve’s thumb in two places with a nutcracker when they were both 13 and that was peacetime, and they were both girls, so the main thing to do is find yourself some friends and stay away from sociopaths of any strike, like the odious Hans Reichslinger, that Nazi scum, but also Lt. Joe Edge, allegedly on our side, but a homicidal rapist-maniac with a bad personality, so that people are always saying to him: “You’re an unpleasant little swine, aren’t you, Joe?” and “You really are a rather unpleasant little rat at heart, aren’t you, Joe?” But Joe gets his own back, and by the end, people are sorry they talked trash about him.

It would be uncool and Philistine to admit liking this book, and I wouldn’t want to do that. I will say I only got up off the couch twice during the five hours I read it, to get some tangerines, to keep body and soul together.