Indirect Nightmare

The Moon's No Fool--Thomas Matthews--Random House ($2).

When a writer's imagination is as great as moral indignation, he is likely to produce a fantasy. In an environment of pure invention, heroes are twice as heroic. villains twice as villainous and life's follies doubly absurd. Toward the petard of such celebrated masters of adult make-believe as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Butler. Thomas Stanley Matthews has hoisted himself with a nightmare called The Moon's No Fool.

An extraordinary piece of writing, The Moon's No Fool is a bold, imaginative flight, but one that seems headed in all directions at once. No reader can be sure his analysis of Mr. Matthews' meaning is the right one, that Mr. Matthews himself was always certain how his myth-sermon would end.

It begins in a matter-of-fact way with a dry, ironic account of the christening of the hero, Ben, born into a family of clergymen. The ceremony is marred when a poor, ugly, distant relative called Miserable Sarah breaks in on the good-hearted soft-headed assemblage with words of cruel wisdom. Groaning heavily, she tells Ben that he has a thin skin "and a thin skin is easy scratched and easy tickled...Play the fool when you come to something you don't understand...If you must play games, choose the one you're good at." Ben's parents are drowned and he is taken in by a pious uncle who soon goes to a Mental Home for Clergymen. Befriended by the fashionable Mrs. Molly, Ben is sent off to school, studies for the ministry, is disgraced in his snobbish surroundings when cranky Miserable Sarah leaves her home in the village of Dirty Gut to visit him.

Climax of Ben's life occurs when he falls in love with a queen. Ruler of a small country famed for its tyranny, she is on a visit arranging a loan; Ben meets her by accident while she is sneaking a last cigaret before a state reception begins. Although the Queen, in manner, speech and display of her girlish charms, has a good deal in common with less elevated wenches, Ben is straightway transported by his love to the isles of enchantment. At a house party with her he makes a romantic fool of himself before her worldly companions, decides to fake suicide, swims far out to sea.

Thereupon The Moon's No Fool leaves its practical moorings as Ben experiences nightmarish visions where friends are all enemies; where the Queen is successively a prostitute, a torch-singer, a dancing partner, a captive; where his fashionable companions turn into policemen and thugs who are chasing him everywhere; where his beloved changes her being whenever he tries to embrace her. Thereupon, too, The Moon's No Fool takes on its elusive moral tone as Author Matthews suggests the evil consequences and addled wits that follow from self-deception and acceptance of worldly standards. Ben is saved from drowning and from his twisted view of life by the despised Miserable Sarah. He goes back to the house party, weary and wiser, to face the scorn of the Queen and her court. But he finds that his best friend has died trying to save him from his fake suicide.

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