Rock & Roil

THE TWO DEATHS OF CHRISTOPHER MARTIN (208 pp.)--William Golding--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

William Golding, English novelist, writes like a French existentialist who has wandered into the Manhattan offices of True magazine. The French practitioners of the art of "the extreme situation" lean to plagues (Albert Camus) or politics and perversion (Jean-Paul Sartre). A Cornishman and sometime naval officer. Author Golding of course sends his existential hero to sea. Aboard a British destroyer in mid-Atlantic, Christopher Martin had just given the order "Hard a-starboard'' ("the right bloody order," too, he later reflects) when a torpedo blew him clear off the bridge. He survives only to be engaged in a new rehearsal for death as the reluctant Robinson Crusoe of a waterless, naked, uninhabited rock.

At first the book reads like a suspense tale of survival, told with a sort of totalitarian recall--minute details of rocks, water, limpets, seaweed are forced on the reader, until Lieut. Martin's every movement is seen as in a microscope of time. Swiftly, the novel makes clear that what matters is not Martin's survival but the kind of man who is or is not to survive. Also, Novelist Golding makes clear a subtle philosophical notion--that one can change the past by what one thinks about it. On civvy street Martin had been an actor (professionally) and a bad actor (morally). Now, as the whole past life of the undrowned man passes before his eyes, he re-enacts the parts he played, identifies his favorite sins--pride, sloth and greed--and recalls the judgment of a friend whose wife he had seduced: "This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on . . . the best part, the best seat, the best notice, the most money, the best woman . . . He's a cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else's bun . . ."

On his nameless rock he has no bun and no penny. As he slowly goes mad from hunger while a rainstorm unmercifully keeps him from death by thirst, he imagines that he is Atlas and Prometheus. By the time the gulls have become flying lizards to him, he imagines--in the fictional season's most unpleasant metaphor for the condition of man--the last huge master-maggot of a box previously full of smaller maggots which, he has heard, are cultivated by Chinese gourmets.

This box lunch may not be everyone's dish, but it is at least something to see a British writer indulging in overstatement. Says Author Golding's victim, as his innards are slowly being poisoned by his diet of limpets: "I am in servitude to a coiled tube the length of a cricket pitch." This may be existentialism, even poetry, but it is not cricket. A pitch's length: 66 ft.; average adult intestine: 27.88 ft.

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