Pacific War: Tin-Can Class

FAR FROM THE CUSTOMARY SKIES (372 pp.)--Warren Eyster--Random House ($3.75).

It is a novelist's duty to tell a story, but it is risky to retell one. Warren Eyster, 28, a Navy veteran of World War II, performs his duty fairly well in Far from the Customary Skies, a first novel about the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific as seen from a destroyer. The trouble is that Author Eyster's book trails in the wake of half a dozen naval novels published since 1945 and never sets a clear course of its own.

The savvy stay-at-home will quickly recognize the officers and crew of the destroyer Dreher as combat-fiction standbys, e.g., the captain, no Queeg of the Caine, but a man who wants a taut ship; the iron-man bosun, seagoing equivalent of the hard-boiled sergeant who chews nails and spits tacks; the gabby liar who peddles cheap moonshine about his adventures with women; the aloof, intellectual poetizer.

With the easy authority of a man who has lived his subject, Author Eyster steers the Dreher's crew through training and up the long ladder of South Pacific victory, from New Ireland to New Guinea, from the Solomons to the Carolines, from the Marianas to the Philippines. Between actions, in endless and high-flown bull sessions, he tries to solve the riddle of human personality as it clashes and cleaves in wartime. He does better when he gets away from the Dreher and its talky crew. He has watched the sea closely and when he keeps a bridle on his metaphors, he writes about it well.

Author Eyster ends his book well before V-J day, sends the Dreher to the bottom with nearly all hands, as the U.S. fights its way back to the Philippines. As a tale of a destroyer. Far from the Customary Skies is miles behind Marcus Goodrich's small masterpiece Delilah. As a quasipoetic documentary of arms and the sea, it pins a few surplus decorations on nature's biggest masterpiece, the Pacific Ocean.

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