Oh, Not to Be in England

THE CENTER OF THE GREEN (231 pp.) --John Bowen--McDowell, Obolensky ($3.50).

If novelists could kill a country, England would be a dead duck. Her young men write well, but they seem to be engaged in a running competition to see which one of them can make life in the homeland seem the most disagreeable. Certainly England has seldom seemed more tired and futile than it does in The Center of the Green, a novel edged with style and talent but filled with characters who inhabit separate islands of despair.

The leading islander is Colonel Baker, retired and gardening his life away in a country cottage. His bossy wife, who is aware of him only as an irritation, is faithful to her housework and TV, but her real occupation is being a worry-hen about her sons--and there is plenty to worry about.

Charles works for a trade paper, and he could serve as a model for the hopeless, lonely English young men who have lost even the energy to be angry. He lives in a seedy flat, eats in grubby restaurants, walks himself into exhaustion, and desperately kills time in movie houses. Compared to Brother Julian, though, Charlie's not 'arf bad. Julian, married and an advertising writer, is a compulsive, indiscriminate lecher without being really lustful. At the moment he is in real trouble, having got his landlord's teen-age daughter pregnant. His wife knows, and soon all his family knows.

Before Author Bowen has completed his depressing but real picture, Charles has tried to escape existence by suicide--and failed even at that. Julian goes off for a Mediterranean holiday with his father to think things out. but simply sinks deeper into sordid sexual adventure. Back home, he unintentionally causes his father's death, an event that leaves Mother lonely but the boys untouched. The colonel was as empty of purpose as the others, but at least he had housed his purposelessness in character. All the boys can agree to do is to "go on trying then. And see what happens. Even if it doesn't do any good.'' This monosyllabic existentialism apparently now passes for positive thinking in English fiction; one critic wrote in all seriousness of The Center: "It triumphs in the end by sheer exuberance."

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