Notable

THE NAVIGATOR

by MORRIS WEST 407 pages. Morrow. $8.95.

Many people dream of escaping the world and fleeing to some unspoiled tropical isle. Most of them settle for a couple of weeks in the Hamptons or a package tour to Puerto Rico. Not Gunnar Thorkild, the half-Polynesian, half-European hero of Morris West's latest novel. The grandson of a great Polynesian navigator as well as an instructor at the University of Hawaii, Thorkild publishes a paper claiming that even in this day of earth satellites and up-to-date hydrographic charts, there exists in the vastness of the Pacific an island known only to Polynesia's traditional navigators. He is promptly denied tenure for this temerity.

Thereupon, with a pickup crew that somewhat resembles a World War II movie platoon--a Chinese, a Japanese, a couple of woebegone Wasps, a Jew, a bitter widow, a good-looking woman doctor and a majestic black man--the professor sails west searching for the mysterious island that will convince his colleagues that he actually deserves a full professorship.

Thorkild instead wrecks his boat and maroons himself and his crew, setting up the same situation that William Golding once exploited so skillfully. Indeed, The Navigator might more accurately be called The Lord of the Fleas.

The castaways elect Thorkild chief and play at being survivors, pairing off in various combinations and permutations, cultivating taro and learning how to make stone axes.

How people endure in extremis, whether on Andean mountaintops or in concentration camps, is a popular theme in an overpopulated age preoccupied with lifeboat survival theory. But West's characters clump about mouthing lines like, "We have all stepped back in time," or pondering jejune perceptions. Sample:

"Relative values change." The book itself seems to be a compendium of South Sea cliches containing, in addition to the mandatory paean to the Polynesian way of life, a tidal wave, a tropical storm and a run-in with a poisonous stonefish--a great relief to readers who had been expecting a shark. One thing Thorkild proves, though: there is no tenure in paradise.

THE WIDOW'S CHILDREN by PAULA FOX 224 pages. Dutton. $8.95.

Coin flip: tails. Very well, this neurasthenic little novel is a wicked parody. It mocks the genre of relentless felicity and refined sensibility, the kind of writing in which nothing happens but much is felt. "Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs," the reader learns of Clara, a young working woman of the kind once called "spinster." Or "Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen." And (Clara, in perfect health, leaving a hotel) "Clara's ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would ever get through the revolving doors ahead of her."

This shallow breathing occurs during a doleful evening in which Clara and three other skinless neurotics are bullied in a desultory way by a thick-skinned fifth person, Clara's frightful mother Laura. The other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness and tobacco smoke solidify into a gel. Everyone has dinner in a restaurant, and it takes a long time to order.

The truth, of course, is that no parody is intended in The Widow's Children. The author sets her dismal characters in their tedious situation quite seriously, as if advancing the theory that any well-described vacuum constitutes a novel. The central non-event of the evening is that Laura's own mother Alma has died a few hours ago, but only Laura knows this. She refuses to tell anyone, presumably because the evening will seem even more pointless and ghastly when the truth finally is learned. "One has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual sense," says the publisher wisely to suffering Clara. The remark fits the book itself, a strange and exasperating display of becalmed talent by the author of Desperate Characters and Poor George, novels much praised, among other things, for their "merciless observation."

THE HAMLET WARNING by LEONARD SANDERS 280 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

Given some commonplace materials, a simple lab and a certain amount of fissionable uranium or plutonium, almost any competent physicist can build an atom bomb nowadays. This unfortunate fact of technological life has stirred dire warnings that sophisticated terrorist groups might build such bombs and use them to blackmail the world --a kind of ultimate crime. While the prospect causes a great deal of official worry, it also provides almost any competent thriller writer with a readymade plot that has everything: timeliness, tremendous stakes and, above all, the appalling specter of a mushroom cloud billowing over a peaceful land.

Author Leonard Sanders has taken advantage of all these literary options.

Most of his fast-paced little novel is set not in (or near) the centers of world power but in the underdeveloped and overpopulated Caribbean country of Santo Domingo. There Clay Loomis, a disaffected CIA agent turned soldier of fortune, serves as chief of security to the current dictator. His main job: trying to quell a guerrilla movement led by one RamOn el Rojo. It is a loosing battle; before long RamOn starts a Castro-type revolution that spreads through Santo Domingo like Asiatic flu.

Meantime, the CIA gets word that a sinister international organization called the Hamlet Group has a two-step plan to shake down the U.S. The terrorists will first explode an atom bomb in Santo Domingo, then threaten to blow up an American target unless their extortionate demands are met. Loomis takes on the job of finding the bomb before it goes off. The writing is predictable (sample: "Turning, he brought the .357 to bear on the loveliest girl he ever saw"). But the plot is full of captivating twists. And at the end all we know about the Hamlet Group is that it has the means and will to try bomb blackmail again--Sanders' own warning that his chilling fiction may not be as farfetched as one hopes.

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