Island Interlude

THE DARK GLASSES (183 pp.)--Francis King--Pantheon ($2.95).

Take an Anglo-Saxon with an ailing love life and plant him under the Mediterranean sun. Will the change kill or cure him? This theme has more or less dominated a spate of recent novels, notably The Exchange of Joy (set in Italy), The Capri Letters (Italy), A Slimmer Night (Italy) and The Sea and the Stone (Greece). In The Dark Glasses the atmospheric catalyst is the Greek resort island of Corfu, and the inhibited patient is a 39-year-old crew-cut Englishman named Patrick Orde whose eleven-year marriage to a Greek woman is not so much on the rocks as thoroughly becalmed.

Biggest Puzzle. Patrick is a kind of dilettante snowman, "detached to the point of selfishness in his chosen serenity . . . his violin-playing, his botany, his photography, his collection of Cretan ikous." Corfu thaws him out--first with a throb of color from its sapphire sea and sky, orange groves and olive trees, then with the pastoral charm of tinkling goat bells and squat white stone houses, and finally with its people, who teach him a language of the heart that is puzzlingly Greek to him. Biggest puzzle of all is his Venus de Miloesque wife Iris, who plunges into the thankless chore of running a local clinic without an outward trace of pity for the poverty and peasant ignorance of her fellow islanders. What she is trying to smother in work, Patrick belatedly discovers, is a long-smoldering love interest in the humbly born manager of the family estate, who happens to be dying of cancer.

Patrick soon runs an erotic fever of his own over a nubile, neo-pagan teenager named Soula. Little more than fugitive kisses and caresses, the affair with Soula is tragically complicated by the fact that her brother Stavro, a boy with crypto-homosexual longings, feels he should rank first in Patrick's affections. By novel's end, Soula has died at her brother's hand. Resignedly estranged from each other, Patrick and Iris leave Corfu chewing the bitter rind of memory, all that is left of their brief repast of the juices and joys of the sensuous life.

Color Shots. Novelist King, 33, who spent a winter on Corfu with the Somerset Maugham Award money received for his last novel, The Dividing Stream, has scraped the marrow of his Greek characters. He recognizes their fortitude under real pain, their histrionics over emotional trifles and their bristling pride. Above all, he captures their gift for draining each passing moment of life as if it were a glass of their own villainous retsina wine. Author King overexposes and underdevelops his hapless English hero, but his color shots of Corfu are snapped with the eye of a Matisse, and Patrick's departure from the Ionian isle seems like expulsion from a demi-paradise.

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