The Why-He-Dunnit

THE FALL OF A SPARROW (309 pp.)--Nigel Balchin--Rinehart ($3.75).

Jason Pellew, war hero and Cambridge man, is in jail, charged with passing bad checks, hocking his godmother's possessions, stealing a car, selling off furniture from an apartment lent him by a friend. As the book's narrator blurts, straight off: "What I want is some understanding of why it all happened--why an otherwise honorable man should suddenly act like a criminal and a cad." In a booklong flashback British Novelist Nigel (Mine Own Executioner) Balchin attempts just that, providing a prime example of that literary love child of Freud, the "why-he-dunnit."

Ostensibly, Jason is one of those charming, feckless boy-men whom women love and yearn to mother and men find alternately fascinating and exasperating. But from the moment Jason is displayed as a terrified small boy, cringing before the hectoring of his retired-general father, the most cursory student of Medic can predict what is coming--the compulsive lying to cover up innocent misdemeanors, the bad time at public school, where a senior prefect spoils him and thereby earns him the hostility of the whole school and a brutal beating, the intense Jewish girl whose love drives him to deeds of derring-do that secretly terrify him, his eventual marriage to a rich, oversexed woman who keeps him as a pet. Thence to despair and the dock.

Jason, despite this psychiatric documentation, is a likable and lively character, the book a pleasant and intimate chronicle of prewar and through-war living. Balchin, one of the most skilled of Britain's popular storytellers, has a fine, spare ear for the speech and the manners of that kind of Englishman who can accuse one another of cowardice, dishonesty or moral turpitude without raising their voices, missing a mouthful of lunch, or disturbing the even tenor of their friendship.

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