Naked Brunch

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by Julian Mitchell. 307 pages. Grove. $5.95.

Julian Mitchell's tricky new novel is about two sensitive, well-educated Englishmen who have widely varying difficulties trying to establish diplomatic relations with their demons and angels. For Charles Humphries, the attempt results in apathy and a self-destructive critical reflex. For Charles' oldest and dearest friend, the process produces The Undiscovered Country itself. The narrator of the novel is not only called Julian Mitchell but bears his real-life social, academic and professional credentials as well.

As if this were not enough of a literary contrivance, Author Mitchell also splits his book into two parts. In the first part, Mitchell, appearing as a character, offers a fluent memoir about his friendship with Charles. It begins in an English boarding school in the mid-'40s and ends with Charles' apparent suicide in the mid-'60s. This is the Age of Anxiety's baroque period, and Charles and Julian experience many of its significant furbelows: postwar empiricism at Oxford and Cambridge, uneventful military service, the California beat scene and damp marches through England for nuclear disarmament.

The second half of the book is presented as Charles' posthumously published novel, called The New Satyricon. It is a fragmentary assault on modern society that surrealizes many of the events and cultural characteristics that Author Mitchell has previously related with a measure of reserved compassion. It stars a familiar picaresque hero-victim who is destroyed by the world's perversions during a quest for the ideal love-object. Although it is replete with sex orgies and James Bondian power fantasies, the satire is based on the story of Abraham and Isaac. In Charles' existential updating, however, there is no sacrificial ram to substitute for Isaac and no hand of God to stop Abraham's knife. The New Satyricon often reads like a pegged-leg parody of both William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy.

Astute Broker. Character Mitchell comments knowingly on his friend's work, which is not surprising because Author Mitchell actually wrote it. Fortunately, he makes no literary claims for it. Instead, the novel is seen as a pathology report on Charles' spiritual trouble, which appears to be a kind of moral onanism. Charles' outrage proves wasteful and leads only to death; similarly, his attack on a corrupt and hypocritical world ends up only satirizing and thus destroying itself.

Mitchell, 34, is a British novelist, critic, stage and film writer. In his previous novels, The White Father, A Disturbing Influence, A Circle of Friends and As Far As You Can Go, he adroitly handled plots, dialogues and the sticky filaments of character development. His latest book reveals him as an astute broker of contemporary ideas and literary styles. The Undiscovered Country is a remarkably self-centered document. Mad Charles is the dark side of sensible Julian, and his existence goads Julian into facing his own limitations as a man and writer. As a novel, the book is too explicit and too facile. But as an act of self-examination, it focuses rewardingly on a permanent inner state of mind--for many, still an undiscovered country --where there exist, unrestrained and unlabeled, feelings usually called love, lust, hatred and tenderness. These emotions are natural resources, and to tamper with their balance entails great risk. Good artists know this instinctively. The German poet Rilke, for example, gave up psychotherapy on mystically logical grounds: if his demons were exorcised, his angels would decamp too.

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