TOO OFTEN THE PHRASE "historical fiction" means either costume drama, in which a dull narrative is tarred up in an exotic time and place, or fictionalized history, wherein a spoonful of fiction is used to make the history go down. Rita Donovan`s Dark jewels (Ragweed, 224 pages, $10.95 paper) is plainly historical fiction. It is set in a particular past time and place, specifically Cape Breton in the 1920s, with some significant flashbacks to other times and places, most notably the battlefields of France in 1917. But it is not a book "about" the miners` strike of 1925. Nor is Cape Breton simply its "interesting" locate. The real, deep, true history here is the history of bloodlines, the history of the human heart. Nonetheless Dark Jewels is also deeply rooted in its own time and place, its setting as necessary and important as, say, the Dorset of Tess of the d`Urbervilles. You just can`t imagine it happening anywhere else. And that`s not all that Donovan has in common with Hardy. There is also a Hardyesque inevitability to the tragedies that pile up in this grim, lovely book. Madness, consumption, and crippling poverty stalk its pages. And yet, given the time and place, these spectres have about them the ring of authenticity rather than melodrama. But for all its tragedy, this is a book of breathtaking beauty. It is imaginatively conceived and intricately, powerfully structured. The story is told in fragments, focusing on one character at a time, sometimes for several pages, occasionally only for a sentence or two. Most of the central characters - all of whom are vital and believable - are members of the Macfarland family: the patriarch Murdoch, his second wife, Holly Danvers, and their children Morag, Jemmie, Allen, and William. Morag Macfarland and Rife Tamer (a philosophical milkman-cumbootlegger) tell their own stories in the first person. All the rest appear in thirdperson narrative. But whether in first or third person, each character has an individual voice that is wholly distinctive without in the least being caricatured. Rife, for example, has a keen sense of irony and a splendid, dry wit. His appearance often signals a change to the momentary relief of black comedy. The book is about a lot of important things: family, love, aloneness, and the past. In some ways it is about all of them at once, and about their interrelation. Rife`s observations and thoughts about recurrence and cycles are as close as we come to a philosophy of history; but, in practice, Murdoch`s visions of his ancestors and William`s vivid association of his doughboy comrades with 1lth-century Crusaders both underscore the pattern of repetition and return in the larger narrative. The past is not simply the precursor of present events, or their cause; it is immanent in them. Donovan is an experimental writer who takes risks with both prose style and structure. But, like the setting, the book`s style seems inevitable: it is not a clever surface, but a part of the book`s essential nature. The same can be said of the states of absolution and consolation attained however partially - by some of the central characters. Peace and acceptance are not sugar coating. They arise, as in life, from the heart of the pain. To say that Al Purdy`s A Splinter in the Heart (McClelland & Stewart, 259 pages, $26.95 cloth) is a much more conventional historical novel is by no means to say that it is uninteresting. Purdy tells story of coming of age against the background of the explosion of the British Chemical Company plant in Trenton, Ontario, in 1918. The central character is Patrick Cameron, who grows up in some important ways during the explosion and the summer that precedes it, facing love, death, and his own physical changes. There is an idyllic, innocent feel to much of the book, partly because of the era in which it is set and partly because of its amiable, untried young hero. Appropriately, the pace of the book is leisurely, at least until Trenton has its lid blown off on Thanksgiving Day. Purdy offers the reader more specifics of local and social history than Donovan does, and much of the detail is convincingly conveyed and very interesting. Unfortunately, too much of it is insufficiently integrated into the story, and occasionally the narrative is allowed to cool while some portion of the past takes centre stage. The same thing happens with certain characters. Because Patrick appears in virtually every other scene, I was surprised when he was set aside for the telling of the courtship of one of Patrick`s grandfather`s pals, an event with no relevance to the story at large. And Patrick`s encounter with Red McPherson, another of the old man`s cronies, dominates the second of the book`s three sections. I couldn`t shake the feeling that Purdy was enjoying Red so much that, having brought him onstage, he hated to hustle him off again. Purdy creates a number of scenes and images that carry conviction and power. Patrick`s foot-race with his neighbour, Kevin, is one of the most absorbing events that occur on the night of the explosion itself. His first encounter with the town`s scapegoat figure, "Crazy" Joe Barr, is another of the book`s memorable sequences: A lovely ambiguity lingers about the teddy bear that Joe either shows or offers to Patrick. To the extent that they are separable, the book`s real strengths lie with the fiction rather than with the history, and with detail rather than with overall design. A Splinter in the Heart is an amiable, instructive tale of coming of age in an earlier time. Sniper`s Moon (Viking, 370 pages, $25.95 cloth), by Carsten Stroud, is set in the present with a vengeance. Frank Keogh, a sniper with the New York City Police Department, is starting to come undone. When it looks like he may be killing people in his free time, he has to go underground to clear himself. The story may sound pretty conventional. What`s so special about this book? Above all, the prose is special. At times it verges on purple, but at its best -which is most of the time - it is white-hot, searing writing. At one point, Frank is an innocent bystander at a violent robbery, and must decide, at the risk of revealing his whereabouts to his pursuers, whether to intervene. The entire chapter is shot in slow motion. It is vivid, riveting, credible. Like the best poetry, it begs to be read aloud. Stroud is also exceptional at creating authenticity through language. I don`t know what New York cops sound like, but after listening to Stroud`s characters talk, I`m ready to believe he`s got it right. They use what sounds to my ear like the right jargon, the right technical talk, the right verbal codes and short-cuts. They are thus brought to life by the words they speak, and their whole story is made believable and engaging by language, both the narrator`s and their own. Another of the book`s major strengths is its portrait of urban decay at the end of the 20th century. The moral corruption at the heart of the story is mirrored by its physical counterpart: New York is both a real urban wasteland and a desolate psychological landscape. Stroud does an excellent job of managing the threads of this story. The plot is complicated and, as the overall pattern begins to emerge, the apparently disparate parts of the narrative draw together with logic, deliberation, and wonderful suspense. Considering how real and sure the book was throughout, the ending seemed to me to strike a couple of false notes, and to be a touch cumbersome in its unfolding. There is, moreover, a kind of boy`sadventure-book feel to Sniper`s Moon, but boy`s adventure gone mad: into violence and despair. Stroud`s cops are part feudal knight, part American vigilante. Bound by codes of honour to each other, they seem to operate in a region above the law. This is a morality tale with a disturbing moral. It is also a stunning, bravura performance. In Other Americas (Simon & Pierre, 303 pages, $19.95 paper), Stephen Henighan tells the story of two brothers, Don and Keith Merrick, who grow up and apart - on a farm in the Ottawa Valley, and come together again under the crossfire of violence in Colombia. Don (the family "brain!`) is offstage for most of the book, and the reader trots along after him in company with Keith, the younger, overshadowed brother. The book is ambitious and earnest and heartfelt, but it simply never came to life for me. Keith is not much more than a bundle of resentments at being the second born. We keep being told that Don is clever, but he has no psychological depth or credibility; he behaves like an automaton. The device of seeing Don through Keith`s admiring, resentful eyes wears thin long before the book ends. All the book`s characters seemed to me both unattractive and unreal; they seemed like ideas for characters, inventions. The story alternates between the past in Canada and the present in Colombia, where Keith has gone in pursuit of Don. For far too long there is simply no forward momentum, as Keith cools his heels, walks the streets, waits for Don to materialize. By contrast, Canadian scenes are both more fully realized and more effectively carried along by events. Unfortunately, the parts remain separate. While there is a narrative thread linking the two, they read like two discrete stories yoked uneasily together. The book as a whole suffers from the same malaise as Don does: the idea is good, but it never comes to life. This is a very ambitious first novel, and Henighan is to be applauded for his attempt to bring the troubling events in Colombia into the world of his Canadian readers. I hope that he will be