In Lilliput Land

MISTRESS MASHAM'S REPOSE (255 pp.)--T. H. White--Putnam ($2.75).

The men & women of Lilliput stood a good six inches in their stocking feet. Mounted on speedy rats and armored in the wing cases of beetles, they hunted mice and moles, and caught fish with horsehair. They wrote unsentimental Lilliputian love poems, such as:

Mo Rog

Glonog,

Quinba,

Hlin varr.

--which means: "Give me a kiss, please, Miss. I like your nose''-- and two-line essays on moral subjects (e.g., "Nothing fails like Success"). They spoke English fluently, but after the manner (somewhat corrupted) of their 18th Century creator, Jonathan Swift. They would say: "He fell Victim to Intoxication, and dismounted from his Nag to seek the Safety of the Terra Firma."

These descendants of the original (Gulliver's Travels) Lilliputians are the discovery of British Author T. H. White, author of three Arthurian-legend fantasies: The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight. He has put them to good use in a book that is freakish fantasy from start to finish. Supposedly a children's book, it will entertain most adults (it is the Book-of-the-Month Club choice for October).

Author White's colony of Lilliputians is located on a tiny lake-island in a vast English estate--among the now-ruined "Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids . . . Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges" through which Pope, Dr. Johnson, Boswell and Garrick once roamed. The present-day heiress to the tumbledown estate is ten-year-old Maria, "one of those tough and friendly people who do things first and think about them afterward." The plot of Mistress Mas ham's Repose revolves around the efforts of Maria's fiendish guardians to abduct the Lilliputians and sell them to Hollywood.

The book's charm lies in Author White's nostalgic evocation of 18th Century life, his knowledge of animal and country lore (in private life he is an ardent naturalist), and his ability to make genuinely dramatic such absurdities as the thrilling rescue of Maria by the Lilliputian rat-cavalry. The best things in Mistress Masham's Repose are the mischievous parodies of human cliches-of-thought--as when Captain, a dog, muses on the virtues of his owner, the cook:

"How faithful she is! ... I believe she understands every word I say. ... I know for a fact that when some dogs in history had died, their humans lay down on the grave and howled all night. ... It was just instinct, of course, not real intelligence, but all the same it makes you think. I believe that when a human dies it goes to a special heaven for humans, with kind dogs to look after it. It may be sentimental of me, but there it is. Poor things, why shouldn't they?"

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