Friday Is Too Late

By Melvin Maddocks

THE SOUNDS OF RESCUE, THE SIGNS OF HOPE by Robert Flynn. 270 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Robert Flynn is one of those theologian-novelists who back their characters up against a dead-end wall and demand their credo or their life. In his latest little parable, Flynn proves he could turn even the Garden of Eden into one of his cul-de-sacs.

Lieut. Gregory Wallace, a World War II fighter pilot, is shot down in the Pacific and finds himself on a perfect gem of a desert island. Four kinds of fruit. Coconut milk. Plenty of wild potatoes. Quite edible sea birds and their eggs. A made-to-order fresh-water pool. Even one fellow inhabitant--a sort of man Friday named Kee. Why, Robinson Crusoe would have been down on his knees, offering up one of his manly prayers of thanksgiving to Providence.

But then Robinson Crusoe's only problem was to survive nature. Greg Wallace is a 20th century man, and his problem, as Flynn sees it, is more difficult: to survive himself.

A log that Greg keeps makes up this awkward, yet stubbornly obsessing book. At first, the entries are all G.I.--the duty jargon of a young eager beaver who has few doubts that superior officers will see his log and praise him for Going by the Book even on a desert island. Then solitude begins to work its mischief by mixing up time and perspective--bleaching the freshest memories, reviving older ones to an almost unbearable intensity.

As the war fades like a dim dream from another world, Greg is beset, rather than comforted, by the ghosts of his earlier life. His journal becomes a kind of letter-in-a-bottle written to his mother, to his older brother, to all the girls he has known--an exercise in retrospection by a man distinctly not used to it.

Rather to his shocked surprise, he discovers he is not really a nice American boy at all. He has envied his brother, neglected his mother, and despised his father, a small-town grocer who joshed his customers while he kept his thumb on the scale. He has gotten two girls pregnant and abandoned them--far more cruelly than he acknowledged at the time.

Finally Greg stands stripped down, physically and spiritually naked. Humiliated in body and spirit, he takes out his self-contempt on Kee--the nagging mirror of his own human weakness--and kills him. Thus the log that began as a military record ends as a near-mad confession, a wild wail addressed to the Rescue God ("We cannot save ourselves").

From the beginning, the helpful Kee has rather obviously been the key to Greg's survival. Does Flynn intend to reassert sadly that man seems destined to slay his saviors? Or is he bypassing salvation theology altogether and desperately endorsing an existential wager? "Do you ever think," Greg scrawls at the last, "that this life is madness, that this world is a prison, and that if you gave up hope you would be free?"

So Flynn concludes with a ragged, passionate question mark his ragged, passionate novel. Its flaws are unmistakable. Nothing happens in the story. Nothing can happen. Furthermore, the writing has to be as ordinary as the anti-hero who is doing the non-narration; the approach must be philosophically simpleminded. But the author's sheer force of will cannot be denied. He hangs onto his theme with the tenacity of one of his island lizards. He has clearly written the book as a personal game of survival for himself; and on his own particular desert island, the reader too is forced to play for keeps. Warning and praise enough.

. Melvin Maddocks

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