Tea Party

PROTHALAMIUM (127 pp.) -- Philip Toynbee--Doubleday ($2.50).

Prothalamium is a novel for readers who have time to read a book twice. It is a razzle-dazzle literary experiment whose pedigree, all too obviously, reads: by James Joyce out of Virginia Woolf. To help forestall and dispel confusion while following his cast of "Narrators," Author Philip Toynbee provides a lettered and numbered graph (something Joyce never did for Prothalamium1's mighty ancestor, Ulysses). Given this pretentious orientation, reading Prothalamium is something like doing sums in your head: drop one character and carry two.

The bride and groom mirrored in the title are "the Living and the Dead," and all the characters are symbolic archetypes who neurotically bang their heads against walls of their own making. Everything takes place at a tea party in London's Coburg Square.

A Harlot's Guest. The hostess is an ex-prostitute named Mrs. Goodman. Among her guests: a kindly, timid intellectual, Max Ford; Max's brother Tom, physician and egocentric man of action; Father Morton, doddering, syphilitic priest; Daisy Tillet, "girl of the golden legs," to whom both brothers are attracted; Miss Black, who switched from an unfaithful Italian lover to religion.

Each character takes the spotlight in turn, bares his or her inner torments in stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf carried off the trick; Toynbee doesn't. Through the dense matting of symbolism (even the choice of tea cakes, the dropping of a cup, becomes symbolic), readers may extract many meanings or none. Guesses British Critic Cyril Connolly, editor of highbrow Horizon: "And what are these figures, but expressions of a deeper truth, of cycles of spring and winter, youth and age, death and rebirth, of the Mother who must become our enemy if we are to grow up. , . ."

The Author. Philip Toynbee, 31, son of famed British Historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of Oxford's Professor Gilbert Murray, is no chip off the old block. At 17 he ran away from school at Rugby, later became a Communist, was beaten up by Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts at a fascist meeting. He got into Oxford with difficulty and became the first Communist president of the Union (Oxonian debating society). He later rejected Communism, joined the army as a Welsh Guardsman in 1940, was "commissioned as an intelligence officer and wound up in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

Prothalamium is his second novel to be published in the U.S. (the first: The Barricades). He makes his living doing book reviews and writing literary pieces, wants to spend the rest of his life writing at his home on the Isle of Wight. Philip Toynbee is a very clever young man. Prothalamium is too clever by half.

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