To the Beach

FALCONER'S VOYAGE (256 pp.)--Hugh HJckling--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

World War II produced no more unlovely objects than the lumbering, boxlike boats known as landing craft, tank (LCT). In grunting, ponderous procession, they nosed in on landing beaches, dropped gaping jaws to disgorge tanks, trucks and men on shell-torn beaches. Their mission was dangerous but not dashing, and their ill-assorted officers were drawn together in a curiously defiant camaraderie of the mocked.

From this unlikely material Novelist Hugh Hickling has distilled a parable of man at war and an odd, rapt bit of poetry of the sea. There are no storms, either of men or of elements, as the clumsy LCT flotilla makes its way from the Firth of Clyde to its appointment with history on the beaches of Normandy. Personalities clash, but, as they must under the imperatives of war, such clashes collapse inconclusively.

How It Was. The British Navy is not the U.S. Navy. But many an old salt, now grown stolid in civilian grey flannel, who never did recognize himself in the labored breathing, self-conscious obscenities, and raw emotionalism detailed in most war books, will relish in Voyage's sharp vignettes the recognition of things he saw and never knew he saw, and will think: yes, this is how it was.

Alex Falconer is a bearded, swashbuckling lieutenant who bullies his crew and junior officers, gulps down immense quantities of whisky, cheats at cards, and wenches indiscriminately. The slow trip down Britain's east coast becomes, in part, Lieutenant Falconer's uneasy odyssey in search of his own soul--a search begun when he learns that a chance bed companion is to bear him a child, and completed when he walks along the littered beach at Normandy. "All along the shore, bodies--beautiful, naked, torn and shattered bodies, a head here, an arm, a leg there--protruded like marbles from the sapphires of the sea and the golden desert of the sands, and the sunshine of eternity rang around them . . . For an age--one lonely, solitary, divine and everlasting moment--the full impact of the terrible destiny of his fellowmen struck Falconer between his eyes ... A love for all his brothers, a pity in all their foolish and vain sacrifices, covered his eyes in sorrow and gladness."

Delicate Balance. Hickling writes of the sea and his ungainly craft with the accuracy of a seaman, the eye of a poet, and a prose that suggests he profitably studied Conrad. His descriptions transform the experiences of the sea from something noted into something experienced; though they sometimes teeter on the brink of preciosity ("A filibuster of surf"), they rarely lose their delicate balance. Sample: "About the ship the sea resounded with fantastic whispers, occasionally erupting against the shivering bows; it moved like a beast asleep."

Falconer's Voyage is a first novel for Hickling, a 35-year-old lawyer who served on just such an LCT during World War II. Since then, he has joined the company of those peripatetic Britons of the civil service who once built the Empire to glory, is currently serving as legal adviser to the Malayan state of Johore. Says Novelist Hickling: "To anyone interested in the human race, novels ought to be as important as laws . . . every self-respecting novelist is a potential lawyer because he must be concerned, whether he likes it or not, with the rules of human conduct."

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