The Perdition of Marius

THE CLOSED HARBOR (315 pp.)--James Hanley--Horizon ($3.50).

If critics' raves paid their way in royalties, a 52-year-old Irishman named James Hanley might well be one of the richest authors alive. When his novel, The Closed Harbor, appeared in Britain last year, Fellow Novelist Henry Green said of Hanley: "He is far and away the best writer of the sea and of seafaring men since Conrad, and indeed in my opinion is much superior to him." Said the Times Literary Supplement: "[One of his] greatest achievements--and of their kind there are none superior." This is a fair sample of what the critics have been saying about Novelist Hanley for two decades. The Closed Harbor goes far in explaining why he wins book reviewers more readily than book buyers.

Its story is as simple and deadly as the flight of a poisoned arrow. Its hero is Marius, a French sea captain who has lost his master's ticket for running a merchant ship into a known minefield during World War II, and whom rumor accuses of some greater, vaguer crime. By day he haunts the shipping offices of Marseille in his greasy old captain's uniform, cringing and wheedling for another command. By night he gets roaring drunk and tries to check his conscience and his failure at the local brothel.

Betweentimes he must face two other judges: a mother as implacable as Madame Defarge who exchanges not a word with him, feeling that his comedown has smirched his father's name (a World War I naval hero), and a sister whose eyes still sting with grief at the death of her only son on Marius' lost ship. How strong the case against Marius really is becomes clear when, in a drunk and fitful sleep, he blurts out that he murdered his nephew for siding with the first mate just before his ship went to the bottom.

By this time, Marius' own end is in sight. His mind cracks. In the novel's closing scenes, grim as any in recent fiction, Marius babbles like a seagoing Lear ("Clear away aft ... let go for'ard") and mistakes his mother for his favorite brothel companion. Unmoved, smugly vengeful, she gloats: "God has drawn down the blind. That is only just ... He is overthrown and that is just."

By keeping the emotional wringer pressed morbidly tight, Novelist Hanley sometimes squeezes life as well as mercy out of his story. Powerful though it is, The Closed Harbor never quite proves its intended point, that the perdition of Marius is the condition of man.

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