Shell Games

By Paul Gray

TURTLE DIARY

by RUSSELL HOBAN 211 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Two lonely fortyish souls walk their depressions around London. William is a bookstore clerk who has shed most of his past, including a cushy job in advertising, his wife and two daughters.

Neaera writes and illustrates children's books but she has grown tired of creating furry and feathery characters: perversely, she ponders a new story about a water beetle. Both visit the London Zoo and independently reach the same conclusion: the sea turtles in the aquarium must be liberated and allowed to swim back to their breeding grounds in the Atlantic.

Were this carapace the whole story, Turtle Diary could pass as standard Disney scenario: unattached, eccentric adults involved in a quixotic caper because of their love for animals. William himself realizes that the turtle heist is "the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith." But he has a significant cavil: "That sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out."

Crackling Intelligence. This is the risk that most sentimental entertainment runs: touching the heart while by passing the mind. Author Russell Hoban, 50, does not take that shortcut.

The alternating diary entries of his hero and heroine crackle with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony. Neither one is a sentimentalist. Both, in fact, said goodbye to their feelings long ago. That is why the blind, homing instincts of the turtles fascinate them. Unlike humans, the creatures know where they must go and venture without questioning. "The mystery of the turtles," Neaera writes, "and their secret navigation is a magical reality, juice of life in a world gone dry."

Small wonder that both come to resent the turtles' aquarium, that "little bedsitter of an ocean" as William calls it, as yet another abridgement of natural law. Resentment breeds a conviction: even though William and Neaera would much rather skulk on as victims, heroics are called for. When they learn that they have been sharing a common turtle fantasy, they bristle; privacy has become their shell, and it is not to be discarded lightly. Further shocks await them. They are appalled when the urge to free the turtles grows into a tidal compulsion. William complains: "Whatever this awful thing is that I've got myself into it's my thing and I've got to do it alone with that weird lady."

At this point, Hoban wisely refrains from offering a madcap chase sequence replete with careening police cars and lovably inept thieves. The escapade is indeed comic, but only in the ease with which it is pulled off. The turtle keeper does not simply agree to look the other way while his charges are stolen; he packs them into traveling crates himself. Their mission routinely accomplished, William and Neaera find that no one has noticed.

Nor, short of momentarily cheering them, does their triumph do much to change their lives. It was, they realize, a gratifying but small thing. More im portant, so does their author. A noted il lustrator and author of children's books, Hoban never claims too much for Tur tle Diary, and that very modesty is the reason for his success. He argues gently but profoundly that human lives are really composed of details as mysterious in their power as the force that tugs the turtles; the most dramatic adventure can unfold as a series of petty and incom prehensible inconveniences. A romantic would emphasize the heroic; a realist would squint at the mundane. Hoban tries something harder: to see both, and the hairline truth that lies somewhere in between.

Paul Gray

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