Lizard in Limbo

THE CAVE AND THE ROCK (276 pp.)--Raoul C. Faure--Morrow ($3.50).

The proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to George Orwell have found animals just as handy. Latest to study mankind by animal roundabout is French-born Novelist Raoul Faure, 43, a resident of California since 1941, who uses lizards for his parable, The Cave and the Rock.

The hero of his book is a 1 ft. 4 in. lizard named Frut, a happy-go-lucky character with a decent respect for the customs of his native tableland. Frut says his prayers dutifully, bows to the wisdom of the Sages, and even intones the slogan, "All lizards are born equal"--though he knows that the tableland is a caste society where high-born tablelanders like himself treat the lowly creekers (creek-dwellers) as slaves and sluts.

Sage Disbelief. In this best of all possible worlds, Frut is frustrated only by his coy fiancee, who keeps stalling him off despite his stirring performances of the mating dance. Restless, he wanders to the edge of the tableland and has an experience no lizard has had before. A huge, two-legged, two-armed Thing not only picks Frut up and then drops him, but the Thing draws on the ground with a stick, making those mysterious signs--a heart pierced by an arrow--the origin of which even the Sages of the tableland are hard put to explain.

Bursting with youthful selfimportance, Frut races back with the news. But the old Sages barely listen, call his story a hallucination. Either the signs are collapsed termite burrows, they tell Frut, or erosions caused by the wind and rain. Defiant, Frut begins to wonder whether the Sages are really so sage. In anger, Frut argues in public that maybe tablelanders and creekers actually are equal. Rushed into jail and to trial, Frut refuses to recant about the Thing, and is sentenced to be eaten by Sarass the snake god.

The fastidious snake god refuses to eat him because Frut has been touched by human hands. Instead, he tells Frut the way to the Blue Cape, a lizard Utopia where tablelanders and creekers live together in sweet reasonableness. After a harrowing journey across sun-baked flatlands, Frut gets to the classless paradise.

Scoffing Educators. Frut finds that gods, as well as classes, have been abolished. Just unnecessary nonsense, Blue Cape's educators explain. Doesn't any Blue Caper ever kill another? Frut asks. Why should he? ask the educators. Is it reasonable for a lizard to kill a fellow lizard? Born reasonable, Blue Capers pool their supplies and their work, rarely bother much with personal names since any Blue Caper is by nature and desire much like any other Blue Caper. When Frut begins shuffling into his mating dance for a female Blue Caper, she says, "You don't have to go through all that ... I accept."

Suddenly Frut realizes that the trouble with Utopia is that it is boring. To stir up the Blue Capers, he tells them about the Thing and its tracings on the sand. "Perhaps it was a dream," the educators scoff, pointing out that sensible Blue Capers accept only "two hypotheses, the termite and the erosion theories." The Cave and the Rock ends with Frut thoroughly disillusioned with lizardly rationalism.

Author Faure's moral is scarcely new. But he does such a lively job of writing about the natural life of lizards (to whom he fondly dedicates his novel) that it takes the sting out of his dim view of the human race.

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