Enchanted Territory

FARAWAY (245 pp.)--Andre Dhotel-- Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

"In any one country there are really several worlds," says Author Andre Dhotel at the outset of this wistful, wonderfully comic tale. His young hero, Gaspard Fontarelle, is born to a resolutely matter-of-fact world, the sleepy, stodgy French resort village of Lominval. But all about Lominval, as the young boy grows up, is the dark, beckoning world of the Ardennes forest. And Gaspard himself is marked from birth as another-worldling. At his christening, thunder rumbles in the distance, and a panicked cat scratches the notary's wife. Calamities hound the sweet, shy child--a deer hunter's slug pinks his skull and shatters a bust in the city hall, a truck on which he is perched roars runaway downhill to crash through a cottage. The villagers take muttering notice that no matter how badly such disasters may damage the boy's surroundings, they never cause Gaspard any lasting harm.

A villain of the piece is Gaspard's aunt, put in charge of the boy because his parents are unsolid citizens who ragtag about the countryside peddling neckties. A mightily mundane soul, the aunt has lofty plans for Gaspard--was not one of his ancestors mayor of Lominval, and another chief of the town's wolf-exterminating brigade? But the never-never land claims the boy; sent into the forest to gather mushrooms, he is soon lost to Lominval and launched on a mad, careering plunge of adventure.

Gaspard befriends a runaway boy who says he is searching for a lost homeland, but it soon turns out that the boy is really a girl. Plagued by an evil servant and a lunatic film producer, aided by an addled deaf boy and a family of wandering musicians, Gaspard and the girl search for the vanished "territory" of her childhood. Because this is a fairy tale, they find it, and it proves to be the wandering carnival world of Gaspard's parents, a world where the horizon "retreats unceasingly in time and space . . . and where we never find beauty without knowing that there's more of it ahead."

And because this is a spoof of the strict and stuffy, the step-by-steppers and the serious-takers of life. Author Dhotel winds up his ramble with the mocking hawker's chant of Gaspard's papa: "Step up here sir; don't be afraid of life. Don't take one tie; don't take ten, take twenty, and have one to your taste every morning of your life! And hear this, hear this, the most necessary and inevitable purchase of all your days, for the picayune supplementary cost of sixty-five francs, this sparkling, luminous, phosphorescent necktie, the invention of the century! See the sun at midnight; see the stars at noon! Hey! Hey? Hey!"

"Which," concludes Romancer Dhotel (in the real world a high-school philosophy teacher) "is the original and only philosophy possible in the territory."

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