ERNEST LANGFORD`s Rendezvous at Dieppe (Harbour, 170 pages, $14.95 paper) takes for its subject the 1942 military operation that cost Canada so dearly. The novel is straightforward and unembellished; it follows four young men from British Columbia, of disparate ethnic and economic backgrounds, through their training, into battle and finally back - the one who survives - to postwar Canada. A timely and earnest work intended as an anniversary tribute to courage, but not scintillating fiction. The Number Hall (Oberon, 158 pages, $25.95 cloth, $12.95 paper), by Abraham Boyarsky, also succeeds better as testament than as novel. Boyarsky`s hero, Raphael Sanger, is a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland, ill with cancer, who has lived alone in Montreal for the past 40 years. The focus of his modest life is a surreal, symbolic game with human counters, played every day, for hours, in a vast auditorium. There Sanger meets and befriends Joseph Goldbloom, in his late 30s, whose troubles include a broken marriage, drug addiction, and debt. By taking on Goldbloom`s responsibilities, Sanger believes he can at last atone for the guilt of escaping the Nazis while so many including all his family and friends were killed. The novel is stolidly written, though it rises at times to a sort of austere eloquence. The central, controlling image of the game is powerful and disturbing; much of the plot that surrounds this core is rather mechanical and melodramatic. In balancing Sanger`s warm memories of shied life with the pathetic routines of an aging urban expatriate community, Boyarsky occasionally strikes the vibrant note ot sadness and loss we associate with 1. B. Singer. But while The Number Hall can be affecting in its humanity, in its depiction of Sanger`s pain and resilience, on the whole it disappoints in matters of fictional technique. The beliefs and feelings in this novel, not the art that delivers them, make it worth reading. In Among the Blueberries (Lugus, 35 8 pages, $12.95 paper), Robin Matchett sets a fantastical thesis amid the forests and lakes of the Canadian Shield. His premise is that a race of aliens has become genetically intertwined with humankind, and survives in a small group of contemporary Aboriginals. The idea certainly has some interest, and the novel`s enthusiasm carries it over patches of turgid description, awkward dialogue, and heavy-duty historical exposition. But the story is all pretty loose and confusing, and finally unconvincing; comparing it to Carlos Castaneda`s narratives of the paranormal (to take an obvious example) will reveal how much skill and control a writer needs to deliver effectively a vision that so profoundly challenges the reader`s expectations of "reality." Among the Bluebenies is a diversion, and at its most contrived, silly; it could, just possibly, have been much more. The Last Expressionist (Breakwater, 220 pages, $19.95 cloth), by Eva Miller, has moments of power, but seems fictionally incomplete. Miller`s heroine, Sally Levine, is a middle-aged painter living in New Orleans in the mid-1970s. Reading diaries from her childhood years in Berlin, she confronts and re-experiences long-ago horrors. Born of an unhappy marriage between the rebellious daughter of a wealthy, cultured Jewish manufacturer and the family`s ambitious Gentile chauffeur, Sally suffers through the political turmoil of the late 1920s and early `30s, her mother`s alcoholism, her father`s Nazi enthusiasms, her own emotional afflictions. Though some of these memories make for vivid scenes, Miller`s dialogue is stagy, the prose in general awkward, and the structure forced. There`s potential here, but it`s underdeveloped. The Sacred Adventures of a Taxi Driver (Third Eye, 538 pages, $19.95 paper), by Ansara Ali, more or less lives up to its title. Each of the book`s 20 chapters details an exemplary encounter between the storyteller, a taxi driver in Toronto, and his fares. Some of the tales are brief, others consume 50 pages and more; all are marked by a cheerful, flowery writing style and a sensibility that wavers between whimsy and mysticism, with an occasional leap into the surreal. It`s a curious book, charming in its way but frustratingly long-winded and wandering; I enjoyed it, but would hardly recommend it as a coherent, effective work of fiction. David Lewis Stein has had a long and respected career as an analyst of urban public affairs; Taking Power (Lester, 411 pages, $18.95 paper) is a panoramic fictional account of 10 busy years in the political life of Toronto, the city he knows so well. From the grassroots effort to stop a neighbourhood-destroying expressway (in 1969) to the election of a reform-minded mayor (in 1979), the subjects of Stein`s novel should be at least vaguely familiar to readers outside Southern Ontario. To that part of the audience who lived in Toronto through those heady times, Stein`s wealth of circumstantial detail and huge cast of characters will provoke nostalgia, anger, laughter, embarrassment - possibly all of these emotions at once. The novel is in the documentary mode; it develops more by the chronology and accretion of events than by mood, tone, or vision. Nothing seems to have been left out. Sub-plots abound; characters grow, change, join, separate, disappear, reappear. At times the book resembles those annual newspaper supplements called "The Year in Review." The effect of the novel`s sprawling circumstantial comprehensiveness is certainly to give fair play to all the ambiguities and contradictory interests of city politics. But the huge canvas also tends to blur the details, to flatten them out, run them together; the narrative point of view shifts so rapidly and regularly that a reader loses sight of a controlling authorial presence amid the crowd of voices and attitudes. Taking Power has, I think, caught the miniseries virus. It`s like Arthur Hailey without the airplanes, or a season of "L.A. Law." If Stein has intended to produce an entertaining work of popular fiction, high on readability, high on unexceptionable stereotypes of behaviour and situation, he`s clearly succeeded. If he intended to leave the message that this is all there was, that Toronto`s struggles to re-form itself in the 1970s are best understood by looking only at surfaces, he succeeded there, too. But I think the novel will disappoint many readers, among them those looking for challenging insights into the deeper currents of contemporary urban change. Taking Power is good fun, but it presents the contours of urban myth, not the core, and turns them into something rather like soap opera. Betsy Struthers`s Found: A Body (Simon & Pierre, 219 pages, $16.95 paper) is a mystery set in and around what appears to be Peterborough, Ontario. The heroine, Rosalie Cairns, finds the body of a young woman, a Toronto immigration lawyer, in the local river; quickly she and her husband are drawn into a dangerous intrigue -involving drugs, religious fundamentalism, and an international adoption scam - that threatens their trust in each other as well as their lives. The novel is well constructed and cleanly written; if everything is ultimately a bit too coincidental, perhaps that`s to be taken as a comment on small-town life. Found: A Body is satisfyingly scary, with plausible characters and a pleasant wintry setting; it`s good entertainment, and opens up some serious domestic issues in a thoughtful way. A plot summary of K. K. Richardson`s Getting Away (Roseway, 198 pages, $14.98 paper) is uncomplicated enough: a woman in her 30s, a university professor in Toronto, plans a sabbatical year in the tiny village on Nova Scotia`s South Shore where she vacationed as a child with her parents. She rents an old house, becomes reacquainted with her neighbours (she was back once for a summer, 10 years before), and finds herself caught up in the drama of their prejudices and aspirations. She plugs away at her book on Jane Austen, but her real task becomes the journal she keeps the novel we`re reading, it turns out - and the understanding she approaches about the humbling complexity of ordinary lives. Getting Away is quiet, introspective, finely tuned. The self-effacing, observant narrator is sensitive to tight and weather, to the rhythms of local tabour, to the transition of the seasons; the novel builds a fine sense of place and a subtle awareness of the ironic pressures of kinship and interdependence. Haydens Point is peopled, like so many rural settlements, by those who stay, those who will go, and those who must come back. Richardson works with a small cast; her characterizations are solid and the tensions she develops full of understated insight. It`s hard to imagine a more cleareyed, more thoughtful investigation into how a small community can seem to flow forever out of its own history, and how easily the patterns of that continuity can be disrupted.