Wild Quaker Oats

KRISHNA FLUTING (266 pp.)--John Berry--Macmillon ($3.95).

Lady Edith is feeling rather pipped, or she would shoot the python herself. From the reports of the villagers, it is a great, ropy beast--and it will creep forth to kill again after it recovers from a two-week digestive coma brought on by swallowing Lady Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about the god Krishna, is going badly; he has caught the eye of a lustful Tibetan woman, who keeps luring him to her hut. A proper abnegation of the senses has become impossible; not once, he reflects mournfully, has he succeeded in thinking of Nothing.

For most of Author Berry's exotic, expertly written comic novel, Peter is bivouacked in a native village while scouting his python. The chief's head wife plies him with roast bats, and the chief himself leeringly confides the secret which has enabled him to live (or so he says) for 237 years: "Copulate every day of your life." Most of the book's exuberant humor arises from the collision of Quakers, who (in the words of one of them) regard the body as "needed for the reproduction of Friends," and Hindus, who. Author Berry suggests, recoil in shock at the sight of a naked hide but manage nevertheless to be thoroughly friendly. In the end. as Peter stalks the python, Berry's account of the hunt entwines the reader like a jungle creeper. The death of the book's villain is a grisly reminder that horror is comedy's blood brother. "Man," one character is moved to reflect, "might be an idea in the Divine Mind, but he was not a fixed idea."

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