Women & Geoffrey Bliss

ASK ME NO MORE (375 pp.)--Pamela Frankau--Harper ($3.95).

This novel has more combinations than the daily double. Against a quarter-century backdrop ('30s to mid-50's) are staged three separate plots: 1) the life and loves of Geoffrey Bliss, a brittle-witted English playwright and "four-letter person"; 2) the struggle of adulterous peeress v. straightforward secretary to find bliss with Bliss; 3) the tea-and-sympathy schooling by the secretary of Geoffrey's sexually insecure son Ludovic, whose mother is the peeress.

As might be guessed, British Author Pamela Frankau, 50, belongs to the Eliza-crossing-the-ice school of fiction: the narrative floe consists in keeping the characters' daydream life one jump ahead of baying reality. She succeeds; artifice mimics art, animation apes life, but the entertainment, most of the time, is real.

Heroine Alex Wharton is an aspiring girl who leaves her father, a devout, unaspiring Church of England priest, for the dazzling world of the London theater. Inevitably, Alex steps through Playwright Bliss's looking glass, when she goes to work for him as his secretary. Bliss is an homme fatal, one of those men three-quarters of whose present consists of past. But Alex keeps calm till Geoffrey casts a luscious peeress, Lady Perdita Carne, in his medieval spectacle play Ludovic II. The soap operantics of Ask Me No More are made palatable by a knowing re-creation of the London theater, lively dialogue that is often outrageously punny ( "Anouilh, get your gun"), and a couple of cocktail party scenes laced with name-dribbling comic horror. It may not be literature, but it is a fairly painless way to decompress, for an evening or two, from the TV bends.

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