An Odd Couple

By R.Z. Sheppard

MAGOG

by ANDREW SINCLAIR

328 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Artifactually, Magog is one of two wooden statues in London's Guildhall. The other statue is Magog's brother Gog. Symbolically, they are London's janitors. Mythically, they are the survivors of a race of defeated giants. An odd couple whose meaning is obscured by the mists of prehistory, they suggest the dual nature of a single being. Brought up to date by the English novelist, playwright and historian, Andrew Sinclair, Gog and Magog come to signify the haunting memory and failing desire of a geratic Britain.

Sinclair's demonic duo first appeared in his 1967 novel, Gog. Like Magog, it was a witty, often brilliant fusing of legend and flesh, satire and swan song. Gog began with a seven-foot-tall amnesiac washed up on a Scottish beach. He proceeded, dreamlike, toward London, where he found his true identity as a wealthy Celtic scholar named George Griffin.

His tale ended at a fork in a road.

Down the right lane waited his beautiful witch of a wife, Maire, and the power and corruption of London personified by Gog's bastard brother Magnus Ponsonby, nicknamed Magog. In Magog it is learned that Gog went left and north to become a breeder of lobsters and delver into the mysteries of the ancient Druids.

Magog is a contemporary wizard --a civil servant whose vast power derives from the ritual manipulation of a bureaucracy that is every bit as arcane as any occult Druidic circle. With engaging arrogance he can honestly boast that "England waits at my out tray." As a highly informed fabulist, Sinclair romps through the same corridors of power that C.P. Snow shuffles through as an unimaginative realist. Myth, politics and culture are nimbly glossed as the author tells of Magog's rise to wealth and prestige. In 1948 Magog, as a specialist in foreign affairs, pays for his sack time with a fierce Israeli girl by secretly shipping arms to the Haganah. He justifies his pleasure by rationalizing that an independent Israel will distract the Arabs from uniting to take over British oil interests. Later, he swells in equity and power as director of postwar real estate development. Outwardly the idealistic public servant, inwardly the unscrupulous hypocrite, Magog exemplifies Sinclair's epigram that "if politics was the art of the possible, then principles were the patina of the pragmatic."

Yet cynicism has little power in Magog's private life. He is an emotional slave to Maire, Gog's promiscuous French-born wife. She favors him at her whim, disappearing out of his life for years at a time. All Earth Mother types cause him pain, including Rosa, one of twin girls out of Maire by Gog or possibly Magog himself. In the face of such confusions, Magog's blowsy mother Merry (Old England?) asserts: "We aren't a family, dear; we're just a blood group."

If Sinclair's novel aspires to any profundity, it is guardedly suggested by his conception of history as an illusive collection of myths that must work themselves out until they return to their original unpolluted form. Magog's corruption and putative incest are steps in his perverted search to regain innocence. "R.Z. Sheppard

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