Miscalculated Mission

ELEPHANT AND CASTLE (658 pp.)--R. C. Hufchinson--Rinehart ($3.75).

Take a well-bred young English lady named Armorel Cepinnier and bind her in matrimony to Gian ("Toughie") Ardree, an Italian-born bricklayer with quick fists and a slow brain, and you can have a nice stew of social and psychological problems. Set the uplift-minded Armorel and the hairy-chested Toughie to living in one of the meanest streets of one of London's slums, and the stew is likely to become too thick to stir.

Author Hutchinson has stirred away so bravely that Elephant and Castle, his character-caravan of London between the wars, is currently being compared by blurb artists to the novels of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray. He has cooked so many people into his plot (over 100 in all) that he has had to include an explanatory list of them. His dialogues range from the chirpings of Armorel's ultra-refined relations ("Cousin Freddie, don't you think it's awful for Mums, seeing the last little chick fluttering away from the nest?") to the Anglo-Genoese babblings of Gian's momma ("Ayee! Serris my Gian . . . allo, mi' picciolo!"). But Elephant and Castle is still a dreary stew of tragedy, haphazardly spiced with a few onions of Cockney humor that don't always mix too well with the rest.

When Armorel falls in love with Gian she devotes her life to improving him, passionately believing that under his simple-simian surface he has a heart of gold (which is true) and a fine intellect (which is not). She goes about her miscalculated mission with such iron ferocity that toward the end of the book some readers will want to liquidate her. They will not have to worry; Gian's nutty old father does that job admirably by slitting her throat, and Gian is convicted of the murder and hanged.

Elephant and Castle seems to be due for the bestseller lists--partly because of the popular impression that any book about poor and violent Londoners, containing 100 characters, must be something like Dickens. This impression will be strongest among people who have not read Dickens lately.

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