Devoted Vengeance

THE MOONLIGHT (309 pp.)--Joyce Cary--Harper ($3). The Moonlight has the psychological suspense of a well-written thriller. But it is something more. It is the account of an English family trying to live by a Victorian code in the present-day world, told with personal aloofness from the tragic consequences that suggests the attitude of Thomas Hardy.

It concerns the twisted relationship of two sisters, Rose and Ella Venn. The hatred between them, writes Author Cary, "had a very long history, almost as long as their devotion." Rose, "an obstinate old spinster, thin and black as a kitchen poker," has all the self-righteous cruelty of a woman whose happiness has been given up for others.

She stops Ella from marrying a poet and forces her into an alliance with a worthless schoolteacher who is already married. Out of this comes an illegitimate child, who grows up and stages her own unhappy revolt against Spinster Rose. Her fate is her mother's: she is left with a child by a country dolt. This is proof, says one character, that "it is often more dangerous to break a convention than a law."

Convention, in Author Cary's definition, is sometimes no more than psychological repression disguised as morality. But one of the women who defies it ends up declaring: "Duty, duty, duty is the salvation. It's a hard bed but it is a bed; one can be at peace there, one can escape from that misery of not knowing what is right and what is wrong."

Author Cary is an Irish-born, Oxford-educated writer who has been widely acclaimed in England. The Moonlight is the second of his eleven novels to be published here. Readers may conclude that some English critics, who compare him to Tolstoy and Fielding, are overenthusiastic. But The Moonlight is superior to most of the fiction on the stands these days.

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