Leon Uris plunges heedlessly ahead, dabbling in half-truths to produce yet another example of the latest non-art form—the propaganda novel.

What he has done in "Topaz" is to take General de Gaulle at a time when his popularity is low in America, assign him an apocryphal but revealing name [Pierre La Croix], make his real identity crystal clear …, and then cast him as a prime villain in a routine spy tale by knitting history and cruel fiction tightly together.

The novel wanders confusingly between the United States, France, Spain, and Cuba with an anti-de Gaullist patriotic French agent as its hero. The date is usually 1962, the chief preoccupation, the Cuban missile crisis, until, thanks to the revelations of a Soviet defector, we are flashbacked to World War II to see how La Croix is manipulated by Soviet agents. And how cleverly Mr. Uris can manipulate history.

Few readers are expert enough to be 100 percent certain where Mr. Uris's imagination has taken over the record. For one of many instances, in history-according-to-Uris, Washington was in on the Franco-British plan to attack Suez and urged the aggressors to capture the canal within 72 hours….

"Topaz," a mixture of history and mystery sensationalized with a scene of torture and one of rape, is high on the best-seller list.