Mixed Fiction

A TRAVELLING WOMAN, by John Wain (207 pp.; St. Martin's; $3.95).

Perhaps because he grew up in a drab manufacturing area near Manchester and once wrote about a young man making love to a doxy in an outhouse, Novelist John Wain, 34, has been tarred by British critics with the feathers of the Angry Young Men. Novelist Wain rejects the label--and with good reason. With this novel about marital infidelity as practiced by England's rootless middle class, he identifies himself with a school that looks back not in anger but in languor.

The La Ronde-styled plot revolves around a desiccated young country solicitor named George Links who is bored with his marriage. To get away to London one night a week, he pretends to be in psychoanalysis; actually, he rents an attic room in the home of England's most famous literary evangelist and quickly manages to seduce the evangelist's wife. After that, the book turns into an old-fashioned game of musical beds: George's wife, learning of the affair, permits herself to be seduced by his oldest friend; the friend's mistress comforts herself by propositioning George. The only perceptible effect of this frenetic activity is that it puts an end to George's marriage just about the time he is discovering that if he loves anybody at all it is most probably his wife. The evangelist, confronted by George in a final bleating fit of frustration, poses the question that stalks all the characters from bed to bed: "Does one person in a hundred thousand know what he really believes or what he really ought to do?"

Novelist Wain's assets are a sharp eye for the social fads and furbelows of suburban England, a sharp ear for the mannered vulgarities of middle-class speech. What the book lacks is either the pulse beat of anger or the tart shivers of satirical laughter.

TURN AGAIN TIGER, by Samuel Selvon (246 pp.; St. Martin's; $3.95).

Tiger is anything but. His stripes are the marks of fortune's lash on his dark skin; his claws exist only in his mind and are unsheathed only when he swipes at matters his naive mind cannot understand. Tiger is a Trinidad peasant who made a half charming, half pathetic appearance in A Brighter Sun (TIME, Jan. 19, 1953). In that book, Tiger went from mud hut to modest brick house on wartime U.S. dollars. Now Tiger is back, and he has two major problems. The bigger one comes from having driven his primitive mind to absorb Plato and Shakespeare: What do I want from life? The second is one he shares with his poor, illiterate neighbors: How to make a living?

When his father gets a job as foreman at a distant cane plantation, he asks Tiger to come along as his assistant and timekeeper. They wind up in a hut at Five Rivers, where sugar cane is life and life is sugar cane. The laborers work under the brutal sun by day, pour rum down their parched throats by night. Payday is so important that those who have shoes put them on for a few minutes as they stand in line for their money. And second in real authority only to the white overseer is Tiger--because he can read and write. He makes friends: Chinese Otto, who orders a radio but does not know it requires electricity; the village laborers, who engage in a mass wife beating when the wives ask the storekeeper to sell no more rum on credit.

But Tiger wants something bigger than this life has to give him. When he deliberately burns his books. Author Selvon makes his points: knowledge cannot be forced; the hero's road runs briefly day-to-day and not in one glorious sweep to the stars. Throughout, Author Selvon's Trinidad is vivid beyond any travel writer's account-- drenched in sunlight, touching in its poverty, and flashingly alive in the near-calypso lingo of its hopeful, gossiping peasants.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.