Obsession In Brittany

MADMAN'S MEMORY (213 pp.)--Roger Vercel--Translated by Warre Bradley Wells--Random House ($2.50).

U.S. readers know French Novelist Roger Vercel for his Tides of Mont St.-Michel, a fictional Cook's Tour of the famed medieval island abbey off Brittany. Less ambitious but just as colorful is the latest Vercel novel published in the U.S.--the story of a rich, gone-to-seed Breton family who live at Plangomeur, a mansion not far from Mont St.-Michel.

Plangomeur was built by a buccaneer named La Hourie. Of all the pirate's heirs, only two women are left: fat, half-mad old Lucie La Hourie and her daughter-in-law Franc,oise.

Lucie's husband ("descended from the corsair just as you descend a long staircase when you slip--on his backside") died years ago. And Luc La Hourie, her only son, was reported lost at sea with a Breton fishing trawler just three months after he married Franc,oise.

Madman's Memory is a study of how the two women react to Luc's disappearance. Franc,oise has long since given him up for dead, but old Madame La Hourie believes that he will soon return. She hangs out his yellowing shirts to air, orders a servant to drag down from the attic the mattress on which he used to sleep. Franc,oise tries to humor her mother-in-law's obsession, but in the end becomes almost as obsessed herself.

Novelist Vercel sometimes fails to make his characters credible, generally succeeds in capturing the dark, moody, half-Celtic atmosphere of the Brittany he knows so well.

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