The Unquiet Englishman

THE FLYING Fox (310 pp.)--Mary McMinnies--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

"Bad show that in Malaya."

"I dare say. Wasn't Old Milty out there . . . Bought it, I hear."

"Quite."

Thus the gin-bashing cronies of Milton Hall, hero of this brilliant first novel, might have summarized his brief and dreadful career as a British colonial officer in Malaya. The story is set in the fictional district of Telebu. State of Mandore. a few hours by car from Singapore. To the usual tropical discomforts is added the barbed wire which confines the town within its perpetual state of siege; to the usual jungle noises is added the rumble of British 25-pounders as dispirited troops try to nose out Communist terrorists in the hills of the "vast sighing terrible peninsula."

Dostoevsky with Gin. The British run justice, administration and the drains, but they have the dead feeling that they are only caretakers for the Chinese and Indian merchants who run the rackets. The new sahibs come from unstately homes (with names like Kosy Kot) in dim English suburbs. They never had it so good ("We're on to a good thing here, and for Christ's sake let's enjoy it"), but it is not good enough. They are perpetually in hock to the merchants, forever struggling to make the frayed ends of their tropical pants match their sahib status. Furthermore, there is the new look in colonial policy: Asiatics have become Asians, and Malayan, Eurasian, Chinese or Indian can get away with murder while the British must punish themselves for the smallest conversational indiscretion.

In this setting--much of it familiar Greenery--Milty Hall emerges as a boozy bounder who resembles one of Dostoevsky's moral idiots with gin instead of vodka to fuel his false fires. He is a middle-class spiv of genius, a portrait of all those who can make love or a piece of change among the ruins. In the wake of World War II armies, he had moved unerringly into the black market up the Italian peninsula into Vienna, but eventually he seemed condemned to living off his wife in London. The need for propaganda ("You just pick it up as you go along, boy") takes him to a last chance in Malaya, where he is supposed to dress up the unprecedented local elections.

Right & Wong. The Chinese know in advance who will be elected--Mr. Wong, who has everyone in his deep silk Shantung pocket. The wise and honorable British district officer can tell right from Wong but knows he must rely on Wong's support. A report exposing Wong's web of corruption and threatening the whole delicate balance of power is drafted by a British police officer. Because of Milty's intervention there follow intrigue, blackmail and suicide. Careers are wrecked. Things will never be the same again at the club. But Mr. Wong will appear in the next Honors List, and Milty, though "bowler-hatted" out of his country's service, will carry on as a shady auto salesman in Beirut.

Author Mary McMinnies, herself a charter mem-sahib (as wife of a Foreign Service official in Malaya), has a cold Waugh eye and ear for colonial types. The U.S. reader, however, cutting his way through the alphabet jungles of British officialese, should know that D.O.M. does not stand for some esoteric military order but merely for Dirty Old Man. It is all a long way from W.M.B.--the White Man's Burden of the great, dead Kipling days.

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