Mixed Fiction

SOME ANGRY ANGEL, by Richard Condon (275 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), marks the third appearance of an ironist whose iron holds a keener edge than most. After his fine, mordant first novel. The Oldest Confession, he did a few handstands to attract attention, and the result was The Manchurian Candidate (TIME, July 6). an impressively comic but chaotic novel whose message--all is vanity and venality, and even the noblest of men knows not the way to the washroom--was not always audible over the author's sousaphone accompaniment. The present book appears to contain the same admonition, though this is by no means certain. The satirist's voice is heard, but the words are indistinct. Worse, the Katzenjammer that muffles it is not Condon's funniest.

The book's hero is Daniel Tiamat, an Irish-American newspaperman (his name is that of a doomed deity, the mother of the gods in Babylonian mythology). The book tells how Tiamat arrives at young manhood in full vigor of mind and body, with a crapshooter's wrist, moral faculties unblunted by use, and a more than Hearstian knowledge of what makes news paper readers salivate. By middle age he is reduced to physical paralysis and the ignominy of writing an agony column un der the pseudonym of Miss Friendship (clearly a fictional cousin of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts).

Tiamat marries the editor's daughter, who, like all of the author's women, is impossibly beautiful, strong, passionate, lov ing and wise (for instance, she knows that as miners get silicosis. matadors are gored and fishermen drowned, so news papermen get drunk). Despite her virtues Tiamat takes a mistress. Since this is a fable of corruption, his enraged father-in-law offers him two choices : quit the paper, or incur certain moral leprosy by becoming a columnist. The scapegrace journalist chooses to lose his soul, and the author to misplace both humor and control of his figures of speech. "While it dipped its pen in its readers' blood." he preaches, "the newspaper industry mumbled on about its sacred right, freedom of the press, and then gutted that right." To Condon fans, the book's redeeming feature will be some grimly comic episodes: the concessionaire who, as crowds watch a would-be suicide, does a brisk business in "JUMP" and "DON'T JUMP" signs; or the drunken and thoroughly fraudulent hero of the Battle of Britain who solemnly praises "the little people" of England, as if he had not seen "a single Britisher who stood over two feet nine inches."

SOMETHING OF AN ACHIEVEMENT, by Gwyn Griffin (284 pp.; Holt; $4.95), suggests, as do a great many other contemporary British novels in this, the sahib's foulest hour, that the Pax Britannica was kept by boobs, boors and brutalitarians. British Novelist Gwyn Griffin is a onetime army officer in Africa who showed in By the North Gate (TIME, April 20, 1959), that he can turn his major dislike into minor but flawless literary art. Now he returns to the attack with the story of Cecil Spurgeon, a tired, self-pitying status-keeper in a coastal enclave of empire in British East Africa. In 1947 he is a glorified cop who bears the White Man's Burden as if it were a huge chip on his sloping shoulders. Cecil comes from a second-rate public school and a touchily impoverished class (lower-middle) that relishes the colonial official's feudal powers over natives, subordinates and foreigners. Cecil's religion is "keeping appearances."

At novel's start, he is nervous because he has just turned apostate to that religion by marrying a teen-age French girl. Poor Cecil seems not to realize that his wife is socially handicapped by a hint of Arab ancestry and an arty kid brother. The plot turns on Cecil's attempts to introduce his bride into the pukka colony (her first appearance on the tennis courts is a satiric fiasco) and his maneuvering for a promotion. There is taut melodrama involving the escape of a couple of interned Palestinian terrorists, who call Cecil "Spurgeon the Virgin" (possibly the reason why Author Griffin gave him this family name). At novel's end--complacently unaware of the tragic mess he caused, including the inadvertent killing of his wife--Cecil is scrawling a letter to his old school paper, announcing his promotion to deputy commissioner and his unfailing devotion to the school motto, "Do your best . . . and then do better.''

Author Griffin's insight into the gradations of genteel snobbery and the petty power ploys of aspiring bureaucrats reduces most sociological studies to the rank of kindergarten scribbling. Still, the sahib at sunset, whatever his stupidities, retains some of the pathos of an old family retainer sacked after a lifetime of bumbling but single-minded loyalty.

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