Mixed Fiction

LOVE AMONG THE CANNIBALS, by Wright Morris (253 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), carries built-in advertising. At one point, the protagonist rhapsodizes: "Old lecher with a love on every wind, and you young ones too, running in pimpled packs after the teen-age bitch with her perfumed heat, and you, too, pretty matron, under the hair dryer, this is your book."

Such language suggests that Author Morris, who won last year's $1,000 National Book Award for The Field of Vision (TIME, Oct. 15), may be fed up with modest awards and cozy coteries of readers. In his eleventh novel, he seems to be aiming at a larger audience, possibly including those who read Playboy and Confidential. He may succeed, for he is an extraordinarily versatile writer. In The Works of Love, he sounded like Sherwood Anderson; The Huge Season rang with persistent echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald; this time he handles sex and violence in the manner of a more or less literate Mickey Spillane.

The plot concerns two Hollywood songwriters, one oafish, the other supposedly intelligent (although the difference is hard to tell), who get involved with two moth-eaten California Cleopatras. One of them is Billie, who talks exclusively in Southern-fried cliches; the other is Eva, statuesque, free, pagan, and therefore known as "The Greek." The story rambles from a Malibu motel to Acapulco; the characters whinny in bed, cry "Man, it's great!" and engage in minor unimaginative forms of sadism. It is just possible that Author Morris is kidding, but neither the lechers nor the beauty-shop matrons to whom the book is addressed may notice it. At any rate, there is a good deal of fun to be had with the two songwriters and the lyrics they improvise.

"You see," remarks one of them as he takes a bite out of Eva's unwashed arm, "we are two cannibals." Then he croons:

A cannibelle's affection is a dangerous

thing.

She prefers the knuckle to the wedding

ring.

The banquet of love

Is the one she cooks

Without the aid of how-to-do-it books.

WITHOUT LOVE, by Gerald Hanley (245 pp.; Harper; $3.50), has a theme that might be described as disgrace under pressure. Mike Brennan, the seedy son of a lace-curtain London-Irish family, is hanging around present-day Barcelona waiting to commit just one last political murder before he tells all to a priest. Like Britain's London-Irish William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), Brennan had fallen out of the church into Mosley's Blackshirts. Via the Nazi SS, he becomes, by double desertion, a journeyman executioner for Russia's secret police. Yet he is not a devoted Bolshevik, simply a self-dramatizing wreck of a man without faith, family or country. His only love on earth is a prostitute called Lola (also a secret agent on the side). His condition is well understood by an ex-Catholic Pole, a sadist beast named Kowalski, who taunts Brennan with the knowledge that in following a dream of heaven on earth, he has lost honor on earth and all hope of heaven. A true nihilist, Kowalski knows himself as a "lost lackey'' of Stalin.

This lackey's lackey is Brennan. With cruel precision, Kowalski gives Brennan his last assignment--on the Feast of Corpus Christi. Assignment: to kill a mysterious ex-Communist who was known during the Spanish civil war as El Carnicero (The Butcher). Brennan cannot approach confession with this last act-to-be on his soul. In the end, he knifes his victim only to discover that he killed the wrong man.

Like Graham Greene, Irish Novelist Hanley dotes on the guilt on the candelabra. He has given his protagonist the usual "failed-priest face," the customary taste for booze, and the symbolical death --Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama.

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