Transvaal Tangle

MITTEE (312 pp.)--Daphne Rooke--Houghton, Mifflin ($3).

The U.S. South used to be the main source of the world's supply of fiction plots about the clash of white and Negro; in the last dozen years, South African novelists have moved into the market. The latest is Transvaal-born Daphne Rooke, 37. Her unassuming little novel, Mittee, is rooted in the well-worn situation of the interracial triangle, but it has two kinds of welcome freshness: it

1) avoids fuss or fury of any kind, and

2) lets Selina, the mulatto girl, tell the story.

Mittee is a story of South Africa in the 1890s, and of three people who have known each other since they were children. Mittee, the white girl, is badly spoiled. With Selina, her maid, she is an unpredictable mixture of warmth and harshness, sometimes petting her and whispering "sister" in her ear, sometimes beating her spitefully. Equally proud and far more shrewd, Selina can only cry out helplessly, "I love her and I hate her, you could never understand."

When Mittee marries Paul de Plessis, Selina goes through agonies of envy. Selina has slept with Paul before the marriage and does so afterward, whenever he turns wretchedly from Mittee's coldness. The triangle soon leads to a tangle of bitterness, with Selina and Mittee still bound by childhood memories and, at the end, suffering together when the English invade the Transvaal.

For all its underlying seriousness, Mittee is written in a light, humorous style. Telling the story in sprightly native idiom, Selina succumbs to digressions almost as often as to Boss Paul. Periodically, the novel stops to paint a tapestry of South African customs and manners, e.g., the rousing celebration of Dingaan's Day, a Boer national holiday, a bit of rural horseplay in which a gullible farmer eats lizard's eggs thinking they are stomach pills. Selina's voice bobs through the story, alternately playful and plaintive, but finally conveying the pain and humiliation for which she can never find a real remedy.

In her three main characters Novelist Rooke has created solid and credible people. Paul and Mittee are decent folk, coarsened by their easy assumption of superiority. Selina is a minor triumph; when she dreamily imagines herself a white girl or secretly dresses up in Mittee's clothes, the novel takes on a fine undertone of poignance. In its modest way Mittee proves that big subjects can be well-handled in small packages.

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