OLDER THAN TEXAS, BIGGER THAN ISRAEL: Review

[Edward Rutherfurd]'S ''Sarum: The Novel of England'' narrates the history of the island from the end of the last ice age to the present moment, mixing an impressive amount of factual data into the fiction. Replete with maps and family trees, the book opens with an etymological note on the name ''Sarum'' (a traditional misreading of the medieval abbreviation for the Salisbury Plain area). Explicitly modeled on the Michener-type historical novel, which measures chapter breaks in half-centuries, ''Sarum,'' Mr. Rutherfurd's first novel, immediately invites comparison with such books as ''Hawaii'' (another island saga) or ''The Source'' (about Israel and the Near East). James Michener, however, seldom chooses a locale already so crowded with literary evocations as England's central plain: Leon Uris (if not Moses) may get in the way of the reader's fresh response to ''The Source,'' but Mr. Rutherfurd has the entire history of the English novel with which to contend. The weight and familiarity of the canon behind him adds resonance to Mr. Rutherfurd's episodes, but also casts the shadow of his predecessors over the pencil sketches of setting and characterization that rush past the reader, as if ''Sarum'' were not the novel of England so much as a reader's digest of English novels. Hardy's darker shadings of the Salisbury area necessarily haunt Mr. Rutherfurd's landscape, Dickens's politics dog his Luddites and Smollett's comedy rattles through his Bath. This would be so even if Mr. Rutherfurd did not explicitly recall them. Such echoing only reminds the reader of real literary losses in the book's march through its half-centuries, and emphasizes the flattening caused by the speed of this survey.