Taylor Caldwell's "The Earth Is the Lord's" … reminds one less of a novel than it does of a particularly grandiloquent opera. All the characters talk in a kind of recitative, the psychology is always grand to the point of inflation, and all the action seems to be accompanied by full orchestra, with percussion instruments dominating. The net effect, too, is operatic, for you feel that while all this blood and thunder verges on the silly, it never really is silly but, on the contrary, is perversely, if only momentarily, fascinating.

Those who remember Taylor Caldwell's munitions melodramas, "Dynasty of Death" and "The Eagles Gather"—her taste in titles runs to the garish—will recall her penchant for the colossally evil, for the tyrannosaurs of the human species. In Temujin she has an unbeatable subject, for this Mongol barbarian, born with a clot of dried blood in his tiny...