England's economic evolution was glacially gradual, and in the book, we follow its slow turn into political history. Rutherfurd's carefully researched reconstruction from chapter to chapter of minute fiscal changes in his fictional society reveals economic history through often intriguing detail. In place of characters, two kinds of interest develop for the reader. But even after centuries of their intertwined fortunes rising and falling, these people are not developed as individuals. Specific traits reappear in successive generations, and symbolize a sort of tribal identity: we come comfortably to expect the next wily, long-toed thief, and the next squat stone carver, over and over again. Five separate families (predominantly the Wilsons and the Shockleys) are traced through the centuries as they live out their lives in and around Salisbury Plain. Instead, we meet recurrent character types. Given this approach, naturally, no one character can come to life. Such echoing only reminds the reader of real literary losses in the book's march through its half-centuries, and emphasizes the flattening caused by the speed of this survey. Rutherfurd did not explicitly recall them.

Rutherfurd's landscape, Dickens's politics dog his Luddites and Smollett's comedy rattles through his Bath. Hardy's darker shadings of the Salisbury area necessarily haunt Mr. Rutherfurd's episodes, but also casts the shadow of his predecessors over the pencil sketches of setting and characterization that rush past the reader, as if ''Sarum'' were not the novel of England so much as a reader's digest of English novels. The weight and familiarity of the canon behind him adds resonance to Mr. Rutherfurd has the entire history of the English novel with which to contend. James Michener, however, seldom chooses a locale already so crowded with literary evocations as England's central plain: Leon Uris (if not Moses) may get in the way of the reader's fresh response to ''The Source,'' but Mr. Rutherfurd's first novel, immediately invites comparison with such books as ''Hawaii'' (another island saga) or ''The Source'' (about Israel and the Near East). Explicitly modeled on the Michener-type historical novel, which measures chapter breaks in half-centuries, ''Sarum,'' Mr. Replete with maps and family trees, the book opens with an etymological note on the name ''Sarum'' (a traditional misreading of the medieval abbreviation for the Salisbury Plain area). $19.95.ĮDWARD RUTHERFURD'S ''Sarum: The Novel of England'' narrates the history of the island from the end of the last ice age to the present moment, mixing an impressive amount of factual data into the fiction.

Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd