Not So Sharp

BRITANNIA MEWS (378 pp.)--Margery Sharp--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Adelaide grew up in Victorian London. Like most Victorian storybook heroines, she lived in a nice house, wore a merino dress and behaved like a skittish filly. It was Papa's idea that she should take drawing lessons. One afternoon her drawing master, Mr. Lambert, up and kissed her. What could Adelaide do? Mr. Lambert was poor and he drank; Papa declared that of course she couldn't marry him. She married him anyhow, and went to live in his dingy flat in an alley known as Britannia Mews. Thus it all began.

It ended an unconscionably long time later, with the Nazis popping buzz-bombs into London, and Adelaide, at the ripe age of 80, still domiciled in Britannia Mews. British Novelist Margery Sharp (The Nutmeg Tree, Cluny Brown, etc.) must have written this one on the back of a series of old paper bags. Disjointed, rambling and generally vacuous, the story limps from coincidence to coincidence, casually adopting or deserting characters along the way, ending in a burst of good, old-fashioned bathos. Novelist Sharp, who usually manages to be witty, or at least catty, can offer here only a few naughty four-letter words, moments of much-diluted O. Henry irony, and philosophizing of the Edna Ferber school. The Book-of-the-Month Club has made Britannia Mews its July selection, and 20th Century-Fox has paid $200,000 for the privilege of filming it.

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