Beverly Swerling: City of Dreams

By MARGIE THOMSON

I F you're after a big, fat, entrancing read - the kind of book that leaves television for dead as an option on a long summer evening - this is it. It's a vast saga of early New York, from 1661 to 1798, telling the story of two ambitious families and embodying a history of medicine and surgery in those tough times. There's lots of love, quite a bit of surprisingly steamy sex, and also plenty of feuding.

Through it all, the surgeon's knives are passed, still sharp, from generation to generation. Numerous limbs are severed with only rum or laudanum to distance the sufferers from unspeakable agony. Early attempts at vaccination and blood infusions - with all the negative superstition that was levelled at those first practitioners - make you realise how far we've come and how lucky we are.

As the story opens, Lucas Turner and his sister Sally stagger off the small, miserable ship that has brought them from Rotterdam to Nieuw Amsterdam, as New York was known in 1661. At this point they need each other. He is a barber-surgeon, particularly skilled with the knife, and about to assure his luck in the New World with a fortuitous operation cutting bladder stones out of governor Peter Stuyvesant. Sally is a talented apothecary, deft at growing the herbs and other plants that were the only medicines available to people in earlier centuries and turning them into remedies.

It is their bitter falling-out that is the watershed for this epic, as each through marriage found an opposing dynasty of healers, wheelers and dealers, financial opportunists and political activists that, in ruthless energy and optimism, embodies in some sense the city of dreams that New York remains to this very day.

While the main characters are fictional, and Beverly Swerling has taken some liberties with history in the interests of her narrative, for the most part she breathes life into a time and place that seems astoundingly real and accurate. She is a painstaking researcher - before beginning to write this novel she spent 2 1/2 years trawling through the many political, historical and medical collections held in New York libraries - and checked out her findings with today's doctors and historians.

She has said that the finding that most surprised her - and which certainly surprised me as I read the book - was the extent to which the early New York economy depended on slavery.

On Wall St was the biggest slave market in the north; New York was the site of the first slave uprising in America, in 1712 (chillingly dramatised in this novel, when the surviving rebels are burned slowly at the stake).

In some ways, of course, this sorry fact simply symbolises the truth about New York: that while cities such as Philadelphia and Boston were founded on high-minded principles, New York was always the place where money had the loudest voice.

Swerling deals gracefully with the many events that come to shape the lives of her characters, the indomitable Turner and Devreys families. She makes one of her main characters engineer snatching the rebel flag and replacing it with the standard of the English King to please the arriving English occupation force, for instance - an event that really happened, although carried out by an unnamed woman.

History marches on, through revolution, religious bigotry, runaway slaves, privateering, bawdy houses and abortionists.

Underlying all the action and the ebb and flow of human relationships, the city itself takes shape under Swerling's pen.

We see it as it was, with its now world-famous streets and roads built along the old Indian trails of the past, and we can wonder at the fact that what were once far-flung villages - Greenwich, Harlem - are now but a subway ride away.

This is a book crying out for a sequel.

Bantam

$34.95