Cat and Mouse

By Paul Gray

THE VILLA GOLITSYN

by Piers Paul Read

Harper & Row; 193 pages; $13.95

Suppose that, in 1965, someone at the British embassy in Jakarta passed a classified document to Indonesian Communists, with ghastly results: at a secret outpost in neighboring Malaysia, a British officer and his men were ambushed, tortured and slaughtered by marauding guerrillas. Imagine further that a top-level investigation winnowed the field of possible traitors down to two men. One, William Ludley, had resigned shortly after the atrocity, when he inherited his family fortune, and never returned to England. In the absence of hard evidence, officials interpreted Ludley's self-exile as incriminating and deduced the innocence of Leslie Baldwin, the other suspect. Assume a complication. Baldwin is now in line for a sensitive embassy post in Washington. Security people cannot approve his promotion without clearing up past questions. Ludley, now living well beyond the reach of punishment, must be persuaded to tell the truth about that distant act of treason. But how?

The answer provided by Author Piers Paul Read, 40, sticks faithfully to the thriller formula: make a stroke of luck seem plausible and clever. Just when the officials need him most, up pops Simon Milson. He not only works for the Foreign Office, but he knew Ludley at school years earlier. Best of all, he has just received an unexpected invitation from Ludley's wife to visit them at their home, the Villa Golitsyn in Nice. After being briefed by a grateful supervisor, Milson eagerly sets out to trick his host into a confession.

After all this winding, the plot should tick toward the hour of denouement. Instead, The Villa Golitsyn keeps exploding. Its cloak-and-dagger trappings mask a quest that is much more serious and dangerous than the entrapment of a possible spy. Before his mission is completed, Milson is forced to test his own flexible, contemporary morals in a series of severe challenges. He becomes, however unwillingly, a student of Christian theology and then its potential victim. Near the end, he must save either himself or his conscience.

Read never allows Milson's ordeal to stray into abstractions. His characters talk about history and ethics, but they enact them as well. Questions blossom from events. Why is Ludley methodically drinking himself to death? Why does his wife want him to sleep with Helen, a runaway English schoolgirl who has fetched up at the villa? And why is Ludley, who once spouted Nietzsche and spurned conventional behavior, resisting?

These puzzles ultimately resolve themselves into a morality play, with principle pitted against expediency. This deep struggle is just as engaging as the cat-and-mouse game between Milson and Ludley. Readers may choose to ignore the metaphysics and allow suspense alone to drive them forward through the book. The Villa Golitsyn can be read once for fun and a second time for enlightenment. Read's seven earlier novels received critical praise but not the commercial popularity of Alive (1974), his nonfiction account of a plane crash in the Andes and the ordeal of its survivors. This book may bring his fiction the wider audience it deserves. Like his countryman Graham Greene, Read mixes espionage and religion, dishonesty and faith. His novel jangles the nerves and lingers in the mind.

--By Paul Gray

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