Confidence Trickster

THE GO-AWAY BIRD (215 pp.)--Muriel Spark--Lipplncoff ($3.75).

Sooner or later, readers of Muriel Spark's fiction come to understand that they have been hornswoggled in the very nicest way. The tactics of this talented Scot are essentially those of the confidence man. The Spark reader is entertained by an apparently straightforward, witty story--until the moment arrives when the rug is twitched from beneath his feet, or when a corps of spooks, bogies and supernatural agents start moving the furniture about, playing the devil with the shapes of common objects.

In the first of these eleven short stories, a man and his wife, living a life of crushing respectability in an awful welfare-state township, pray to the Virgin to be relieved of their childlessness. Their prayers are answered. But the Madonna in "heir church, a figure carved from Irish Dog oak, is black as ebony; so, too, is their first-born child. This merciless story makes plain that neither inheritance nor adultery with a Jamaican can explain the couple's embarrassingly Negroid blessing. For all its apparent defiance of realism, this kind of Spark fiction--typical of most tales in this collection--has honest intentions: to make vivid the author's conviction that the face of the world is a mask, and that the real hoax is on those

who believe only what the eye can see.

No Strings Attached. The title story, really a short novel, is somewhat different from the others: it shows what Muriel Spark can accomplish when she forswears the stage properties of the semi-supernatural suspense story and moves her characters about with no strings attached, "he tells the life and death of Daphne du Toit, an enchanting and entirely credible South African girl whose betrayed dreams illuminate a basic Spark theme--the cruelty of reality and the greater cruelty of the illusions that falsify it. (British Author Spark herself spent 6 1/2 years in Southern Rhodesia during World War II, working at "odd jobs, waiting to get home and trying to write.")

Daphne's childhood is haunted by the go-away bird, a grey-crested lourie, or parrot, whose eponymous cry seems to her a command to leave the provincial, semisavage, secondhand and second-rate life of a British African colony for the authentic glories of historic England. Alas, her dreams are of a "land that was not, that is passed away"--the Rupert Brooke-ish Lubberland where the church clock stands at ten to 3, and there is honey still for tea, where life is a vision of white flannels on a vicarage lawn, and the Guard is always being changed but never for the worse.

In contrast to these dreams, life on the African home farm is twisted in a pattern of almost Faulknerian grotesquerie; Daphne's uncle is in bondage to his farm manager through an unavenged adultery a generation back; Auntie lies year long in a whisky fog with a loaded revolver at her bedside; her one friend is a boozy Cambridge expatriate who must, for his own reasons, falsify what "home" is like. Society at the local dorp is of inconceivable tedium, and only the natives in their kraals suggest that life lived on its own terms may be a good thing. When Daphne finally escapes to her never-never land, Author Spark moves to her fictional kill like a Mau Mau houseboy.

Harpies & Men of Sorts. Daphne's English relations are a damply rotting family who call each other with gruesome whimsy names drawn from Gilbert & Sullivan and Kenneth Grahame, "Uncle Pooh-Bah," "Rat," etc. Then, belatedly, she is to be presented at court by a friend of a relative, a grizzly social harpy who earns her fat fee by staging lunches at the Ritz to meet other harpies and conscripted young men who turn out to be either too young or ineligible by reason of honest imbecility. Later chums are either married, queer or worse. Daphne goes back to the boredom of colonial clubland, and to a fate that is too painful to record. But the reader may be permitted to suspect that Author Spark enjoys it up to the last twist of the garrote.

With her novels Momento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark, 42, won the kind of grateful acclaim that goes to an entertainer whom highbrows are not ashamed to be caught reading. This collection is another sign that the short story--which a few years back seemed exhausted in the banalities of realism plus mood--is still a natural form for those with a lively mind, a deft style and a crisp point to make. With other British writers such as Angus Wilson (whom she closely resembles) and V. S. Pritchett, Author Spark has in fact shown that the short story need not be just a thin slice of life cut by those who cannot carve a whole roast novel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.