A Habitable Hell

THE BARBARY LIGHT by P. H. Newby. 286 pages. Lippincott. $3.95.

At 40, Owen Hanner has it made. Weekdays--or, more accurately, nights --he is petted in London by his charming brunette mistress Alex. Weekends, he travels down to Oxfordshire to be sedately worshiped by his handsome blonde wife Sybil. When not playing house with his unsuspecting ladies, Owen lives dangerously in the business world. A topflight accountant specializing in bank foreclosures, he has devised an unethical but within-the-law gimmick that adds pounds and pounds to his income.

Sexless Harem. Then one unfortunate day, Owen has an impulse toward candor and tells his mistress he has a wife and his wife he has a mistress. Neither seems particularly surprised, for, as Sybil puts it, Owen has always been "a bit of a liar." Sybil goes dutifully up to London for the great confrontation scene. Finding Alex feverishly ill, she hustles the girl down to Oxfordshire to convalesce under Owen's roof. Nights, wife and mistress sit contentedly together doing jigsaw puzzles; occasionally they dissolve into helpless laughter at the thought of Owen's predicament. The poor, ridiculous man has what amounts to a personal harem, except that neither woman will have anything to do with him.

Owen tries hard to isolate the virus of his impulsive truth telling. He recognizes that his devious life had put such a premium on lying that he often felt like a stand-in character for himself. Further, he had developed over the years an intense desire to be known and understood fully by others. The contagion of honesty proves as ruinous in business as in love.

Baffling Charm. Author Newby peoples his lively books with rogues and innocents and makes both types fresh and fascinating. In The Picnic at Sakkara, he wittily chronicled the blundering adventures of Edgar Perry, a British innocent at large in King Farouk's Egypt. The baffling charm and evasive malevolence of a restive Egypt have never been better evoked, or with more understanding. In The Barbary Light, his hero is a rogue who has all the equipment needed to be a killer except the killer's instinct -- in fact, Owen suffers from immoral flabbiness. Newby, moreover, is one of the few male writers able to get convincingly inside a woman's character. Sybil seems so stolid and pragmatic on the surface but secretly lives an exciting life of the imagination with her rakish, long-dead first husband. Flighty Alex is another flawed rogue, who would like to be a bitch except that she hates hurting people. What makes Newby a rare author for his time and place is that he is so warmly on the side of all the characters he creates.

This excellent new novel embodies Newby's view that most men create their own "heaven" or "hell" here on earth. It also toys with the Shavian paradox that a terrestrial hell can be far more habitable than a terrestrial heaven. Not least among the compensations, Owen reflects after telling all to Sybil, is that "they were talking about something real for once."

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