Mixed Fiction

I WILL NOT SERVE, by Eveline Mahyere (164 pp.; Dufton; $3), is a first novel that ends when the 17-year-old heroine commits suicide. Not long before its European publication in 1958, Swiss Author Eveline Mahyere turned up the gas in her parents' Geneva apartment and committed suicide herself at the age of 28. In France, critics praised I Will Not Serve, even found a warning and a message: modern youth has too much freedom, which it is "incapable of enduring." Parents of free U.S. youngsters are more likely to decide that both author and heroine were special cases for whom the verdict has to be: sick, sick, sick. But this is a book written from the heart, and it is not easy to ignore.

Author Mahyere, daughter of a strict Geneva pastor, in most respects evidently modeled her heroine after herself. Sylvie is a Parisian schoolgirl, a Lesbian who tries to make it on pills and "oceans of alcohol." She has been turned out of two schools, the second time from a convent school for writing a love letter to a teacher. Sylvie has long since decided that she ought to be dead, but death frightens her. Yet to live, "one has to choose between three houses where one is shut up; the asylum, the convent and the brothel." In her view, of course, the convent's dedicated Christians are "puppets worshiping their own strings." What weakens I Will Not Serve is Sylvie's own knowledge that all she really wants of life is forbidden love. Failing to receive it on her terms, she is acute enough to know that her real adversary is God, and that he has won. Out on the street with a hangover and half a packet of dope to reinforce her vision, she plays bullfighter, passes her cape over the hoods of passing cars until she is hit.

I Will Not Serve was written without skill, even without firm knowledge of its implications; but even in translation, its cry of girlish despair rises above the confusion of both author and heroine.

A TWIST OF SAND, by Geoffrey Jenkins (276 pp.; Viking; $3.95), proves once again that a proper adventure story translates the reader instantly from a world that is merely actual--represented by thinning hair and thickening wife--to one that is gloriously real. This putative planet, circumnavigated by Author Jenkins' sea thriller, is the realm of the dead mariner's cryptic map, the deathbed revelation cut off in mid-gargle, the implacable enemy, and the beautiful girl scientist who carries on the quest that killed her father. The story's hero has the sort of face that is weathered by wind, war, and lately by the floodlights of cigarette-ad photographers. In World War II, Geoffrey Peace was a much-decorated submarine commander, but after a mysterious mission he was cashiered from the Royal Navy, and his dark deeds since then do not bear close examination.

Because Skipper Peace is exactly the kind of cavalier that the reader, actuality aside, knows himself to be, the swoops of a hyperbolic plot hardly matter. What is the man doing off the coast of South West Africa in a vessel fitted out as a lowly trawler, but bearing high-speed engines in the hull of a yacht? The shoreline he approaches is forbidden, diamond-rich territory; is Peace after contraband?

A flashback may not be absolutely necessary to explain all this, but before long the reader is sweating out a depth-charge bombardment on the bottom of the Mediterranean and a top-secret assignment to track down a German nuclear submarine. It is not until the last chapter of A Twist of Sand, after the hero has grinned weakly back at death, that the reader learns what everything is about. Actuality-lubbers may carp that the novel contains water, water everywhere, and not a grain of salt. But the writing of South African Author Jenkins is taut as a wind-filled sail, and hardened fantasts will return from his voyage happier men.

LOOK TO YOUR GEESE, by Jacquin Sanders (256 pp.; Putnam; $3.75), is caught in the revolving door of its author's indecision about whether to make it sexy, spoofy, or good red-blooded historical. It is none of these, with tantalizing touches of all three. As is suggested by his subtitle, The Deflowering of New England, Author Sanders sets out to give the prim and toplofty early Puritan fathers a lowbrow ribbing. His hero, Tom Hewitt, is a widower with a son and daughter bearing the good Puritan names Absolute and No. Tom, a Puritan himself, has been hounded from pillory to post for being the son of a Quaker proselytizer. Rifle in hand, Tom finally establishes squatter's rights in an abandoned homestead on the outskirts of a tiny Massachusetts town called Gruel. Gruel is gruesome. It is a concentration camp of avid conformists ruled by a dictator-magistrate whose chief henchman is a sadistic "tything man."

Some of Author Sanders' comic set pieces are well done, as, for instance, the story of a Puritan martyr who dies in misery when he discovers that he actually enjoys the agony of the flames in which he is being roasted by the Indians. A few of the novel's quasi-modern character gargoyles are amusing, notably the arty son of an Indian chief who wants to carve nonrepresentational tribal fetishes. But Author Sanders periodically floods his narrative with melodramatic gore that drowns the comic mood. Indeed, the bloodletting goes on at such a furious pace that the reader may suspect that only God can save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

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