THE GOLDEN PRINCESS, by Alexander Baron (378 pp.; Ives Washburn; $3.95), is a novel of high adventure telling how Hernando Cortés conquered Mexico with the aid of his Indian mistress. Skeptics to the contrary, English Author Baron is dealing no joker from the historical deck; it really happened that way. Malinali, or Marina, as the Spaniards christened her, emerges as a tawny tidbit just turned 18 and just about Cortés' first Mexican conquest. Intelligent and fearless, she soon comes to share his council as well as his bed. On the long, fierce road to the golden halls of Montezuma, Cortés relies on her as his eyes, ears and translating tongue. Faithful Marina also bears Cortés a son. Yet Novelist Baron never allows her to blot out the challenging figure of the great conquistador. His Cortés is a hypnotic leader who can inspire lukewarm, greedy fighters to swashbuckle down to their job. Exploring the inner man as well, Author Baron describes Cortés as a Byron turning Napoleonic, as a would-be servant of God becoming the Devil's disciple, slaughtering some 250,000 Aztecs in the famed siege of Tenochtitlan. Remembered for a superior World War II novel (From the City, from the Plough), Novelist Baron has switched easily from Sten guns to harquebuses, splashes his pages with just the right mixture of bravery and bravura. But beyond that, he captures what few historical novelists even pursue—the moment of impact between two cultures, Western man of the high Renaissance forcing his Faustian will on the passive, hieratic Aztec civilization as it muses in "a trance of centuries."
HOMECOMING, by Jiro Osaragi (303 pp.; Knopf; $3.75). Billed as a major achievement of Japan's postwar literature, the novel at its best is an unblinking account of the high cost of survival in a defeated country. At its worst, Homecoming plays the old tearjerking Enoch Arden plot to the accompaniment of samisens instead of violins. Kyogo Moriya is a fiftyish Japanese ex-naval officer who sits out the first part of World War II in self-exile in Singapore because of a youthful gambling scandal. There a svelte adventuress two-times him into jail. Back in Japan after war's end, he sedulously avoids his wife, who has remarried in the meantime, and his grown-up daughter. He gets caught up with a whole series of characters who are more representative than real: a serious painter who stays alive by strumming a guitar in a sleazy cabaret, an ex-admiral who checks shipments at a soap factory, a black-marketeering student with a nose for yen and a yen for such un-Japanese customs as holding hands and kissing. Like identical beads, these characters are threaded on the same theme another Japanese novelist, Kikou Yamata, recently used in her spare and superior novel, Lady of Beauty (TIME, Aug. 30). The theme: Japan isn't what it used to be. In traditional Japanese style. Author Osaragi frequently confuses his writing hand with the long arm of coincidence. He arranges no happy ending, but he does fashion a moving confrontation between Kyogo and his daughter and a sex-sizzling finale with the double-crossing adventuress.