A Devil Called Douglas

THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE (160 pp.) --Muriel Spark--Lippincott ($3.75).

"Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?" the vicar asks Humphrey.

"No," Humphrey replies, "to be quite frank, I won't."

It is really the Devil who is speaking so caddishly through Humphrey. The Devil in this incarnation is known as Dougal Douglas, or occasionally as Douglas Dougal, and he comes equipped with a crooked right shoulder, a clawlike right hand, and two small bumps on his head where a plastic surgeon has removed the horns. When he looks at people, he is "like a succubus whose mouth is its eyes." In the short span of this hilarious novel, Douglas the Devil coaxes into mortal sin not only Humphrey Place but most of the first citizens in the South London district of Peckham Rye.

British Novelist Spark has been compared to Evelyn Waugh, but the comparison is inexact: she is, in fact, a kind of welfare state Jane Austen, a novelist in whose hands the commonplace becomes mysteriously implausible, the routine eerily irrational. Unlike the scheming septuagenarians of her earlier novel, Memento Mori, the inhabitants of Peckham Rye are so determinedly average that they lack even the capacity to sin grandly. When Mr. Vincent Druce, the managing director of a small textile firm, visits his secretary, Miss Merle Coverdale, to make love to her in the evening, their activity is as carefully calculated as the time-motion studies with which Druce plagues his employees: dinner before the TV (Brussels sprouts with a bottle of stomach tablets by the plates), an hour in bed, in the course of which Merle "twice screamed because Mr. Druce had once pinched and once bit her," and after which she habitually "went into the scullery and put on the kettle while he put on his trousers and went home to his wife."

When Dougal comes among these people, as director of "human research" in Mr. Druce's textile firm, the tangled fabrics of their lives come suddenly and bewilderingly apart. Dixie Morse, who is working nights at a cinema in order to save money for a model bungalow, refuses to sleep any longer with Humphrey Place, and he, in turn, leaves her at the altar. Mr. Weedin, the personnel manager, looks into Dougal's bewitched eyes and at "the alarming bones of his hands" and suffers a nervous breakdown. Mr. Druce himself, suspecting that Dougal is a police informer in alliance with Merle Coverdale, kills his mistress by stabbing her nine times with a corkscrew. Dougal at about that time flees Peckham Rye for Africa, where he makes a living selling portable tape recorders to witch doctors.

Neither Dougal's victims nor the reader ever discovers precisely what is deviling them. It is Novelist Spark's triumph that it never seems to matter. When Dougal is accused of being "unnatural," he replies: "All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural." On every page of Peckham Rye, the author demonstrates that notion with high comic brilliance and a strabismic set of eye.

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