Of Good & Evil

SCOTLAND'S BURNING (300 pp.)--Nathaniel Burl--Little, Brown ($3.50).

At least since the days of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the literature of adolescence has been full of sensitive schoolboys hounded by packs of their coarser fellows. Novelists like to even the old scores retroactively by painting the tormentors as unmitigated monsters. In Scotland's Burning, a first novel with autobiographical overtones, Nathaniel Burt offers a refreshingly different version. He writes an indictment without bitterness, a confession with candor. Scotland's Burning is the first-person story of a year in the prep-school life of Anthony Comstock,* 14, told by the hero 25 years later.

Inhibited and shy, Tony has "a childish and luminous beauty" that makes him a success with adults, but a failure in the uncompromising world of his school fellows. Tony gets playfully slapped around by his roommate and bullied from time to time by Sam Petrie, the meanest boy in school. Tony's frailty of body is matched by poverty of spirit, and he suffers his indignities fuming, but in cowardly silence.

One night when he is sick in the infirmary, he listens at the bathroom wall with Sam Petrie and hears the buxom nurse and the school hero making love in the next room. Sam swears Anthony to secrecy, then blackmails the nurse and steals morphine, which he sells in town. At last the scandal is brought to a teacher whom Anthony admires. Trying to persuade Tony to disclose the identity of the guilty boy, the teacher tells him that the question is "as simple as cops and robbers . . . You've got to let your conscience decide which side is wrong and which is right, and then you've got to stick. Even if you hate the cops; even if it means being a traitor to your friends. Even if a lot of bad people are on the good side and good people on the bad side."

But though he wavers, Tony does not "betray" Sam. By the end of the school year, however, Tony's sense of guilt and shame makes him realize that his loyalties were misplaced. Novelist Burt handles his characters with skill and his language with precision, and he has managed to turn out a morality in which he spares his readers any moralizing.

* No conscious kin, in Novelist Burl's mind, to the celebrated anti-vice crusader of the same name. Burt picked his hero's given name first, and Comstock "just popped up" from the Burt subconscious to go with it.

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