Some Like It Hot

By Mayo Mohs

CHARIOT OF FIRE

by E.E.Y. HALES

191 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Henry Brock is an English bachelor and a railway man with a precise idea of heaven: "The right sort of train to London ... a morning train, with a good breakfast car, lots of coffee and toast and bacon and eggs and marmalade, the newspaper, and two or three hours of pleasantly changing views through the window." Alas, such bliss is denied him. On holiday in Italy, Brock and his girl friend are drowned when their cruise ship sinks. Because of his record of unrepented fornications, he is sentenced to the Second Circle of Hell --Dante's Circle of the Lascivious.

Affronted, Brock purloins a ticket to heaven instead. But paradise makes him uncomfortable, despite the music (Faure's Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth), the soaring entrance hall and the "little mayonnaise concoctions" served by white-robed nuns. Brock gladly boards a plane for his assigned place in hell and his fate: to fornicate forever.

Thus British Historian E.E.Y. Hales sets the stage for an engaging theological fantasy that would have done credit to the late Anglican author C.S. Lewis. Like Lewis' Great Divorce and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan section of Man and Superman, Chariot of Fire suggests that hell is what one makes of it --and so is heaven.

Brock is not about to take hell lying down. Before falling completely into his rut, the ex-railroader busies himself with refurbishing the Limbo Line, a rickety train that runs from the First to the Fourth Circle of Hell -- home of the avaricious. He is swiftly drawn into infernal politics. Cleopatra, the Second Circle's reigning queen, wants to rule all upper hell. Sister Martha, a heavenly busybody who wants to liberate souls from Limbo, will not hear of this. Satan, naturally, is enraged by Cleopatra's ambition.

Brock suddenly becomes the indispensable man in the middle. Satan needs the Limbo Line to transport cannon across the bottomless mud of the gluttons' Third Circle. The archangel Michael, ready to wage another Miltonic war against Satan, needs the railroad to carry his chariot of fire across the same sea of mud.

Town Dump. All of this would seem preposterous if Author Hales did not charm the reader with the earthiness of his hell. There are no fork-wielding demons and no brimstone. It is only in the town dump that "the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not." Though Hales draws many of his characters from Dante's subterranean aristocracy, he sketches them with fresh wit. Cleopatra, for instance, has something of an American accent because she has been "surrounded, for the last hundred years at least, more by Americans than British."

Brock is not irrevocably lost. His shrewd shuttle diplomacy in hell puts him in a unique position to demand a reward. To reveal what that is would spoil the reader's fun, but the prize under lines the irony of the sign that greeted him in the Second Circle: "Hell is where you are free to be yourself, and nothing but yourself." Mayo Mohs

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