Blaydon's Progress

BROTKERLY LOVE (282 pp.)--Gabriel Fielding--Morrow ($3.95).

Few heroes of modern fiction have been as unlucky in love as John Blaydon. In two previously published books (Through Streets Broad and Narrow, In the Time of Greenbloom) chronicling various periods of John's life, he has consistently lost the girls he loves. In this third volume of the Blaydon family saga, John is beat out again, and this time by his dashing older brother, David. When Giselle, who is French and flighty, seems ready to return to his arms from her fling with Big Brother, John tells her pettishly: "I hate eating from dirty plates." Giselle responds: "You insulting little English pig."

Author Fielding is bent on proving that it is better to have loved and lost, like John, than always to win, like David. A handsome, if somewhat tarnished ornament of the Anglican clergy, David believes in the laying on of hands, at least with female communicants. But David's way is strewn with obstacles, the most formidable of which is his Godfearing, hot-tempered mother, who tries to purge him of lechery through prayer, threats, and maternal tantrums. David's sin is diagnosed by a saintly monk as a "fear of fear." In the end, what finishes David is what eventually brings down most Don Juans--the cumulative weight of complication, subterfuge, blackmail, lies and disorder that results from a lifelong dalliance with too many women, and loyalty to none.

Young John draws his own conclusions from his brother's parabolic career. He reflects that, over the years, the Blaydons "had prayed for peace and there was war. They had prayed for father's health and it was broken; they had prayed without cease for the churches, and they were empty; they had prayed for David and he was lost to them." John's personal answer is to join the Communist Party, but it is quite clear that a materialist religion will satisfy him no more than a God-directed one.

Gabriel Fielding's books about the Blaydons are intended as a major effort "to explore the moral and spiritual values of the confused middle class of our time." This central concern makes young John Blaydon considerably more important than that stock figure of current British fiction, the "sensitive young man." In Blaydon's comic failures in love, his hopeless involvement with family, and his fumbling exploration of religion and politics, Author Fielding finds mirror images of the society John Blaydon so uneasily inhabits.

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