Mixed Fiction

THE HIDING PLACE, by Robert Shaw (254 pp.; World; $3.50), concerns two British airmen who parachute over Bonn from a burning Lancaster during the closing months of World War II. A meek, wispy druggist's clerk takes them into his house, feeds them, and misdirects a Gestapo search party. The flyers congratulate themselves on their luck and hide out for a week in the clerk's wine cellar. But one morning when they awaken, they are chained and handcuffed.

Seven years later, in 1952, they are still there. Hans, their captor, has told them of the war's progress; Germany, with its jet planes and guided missiles, is winning, and the collapse of the Allies must come soon. Dressed in civil defense uniform, he serves breakfast and dinner to his prisoners, thoughtfully supervises their exercise and frets like a mother if one of the men seems out of sorts.

Both Kafka and Orwell might have created the author's weird wine cellar--Kafka so that the flyers might molder in the hallucinatory dark, Orwell in order that they might escape to comment ironically on the world's regress. But British Author Shaw, a stage and movie actor who wrote the book between engagements, describes his characters deftly in the manner of the standard psychological novel. Hans is a latent homosexual who tends his human house pets as a kind of offering to his Fuehrer and his dead, domineering mother. Wilson, the older of the two flyers, has discovered a talent for writing and has come to love his cell. Connolly, his friend, is near collapse; reveries of his wife have a narcotic intensity, and when they are replaced, it is by suicidal depresson. Each man realizes, finally, that he has found a certain amount of self-knowledge in the hiding place. The book makes its point well enough, but the quiet conclusion is disappointing. The allegory that the reader suspected at the beginning was there all right, locked in with Wilson and Connolly. At the book's end it is still trying feebly to get out.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, by Walter M. Miller Jr. (320 pp.; Lippincott; $4.95), belongs to the growing literature of the A-cum-H-bomb jitters. As the book opens, it is early in the 32nd century A.D. Thermonuclear warfare has made the North American continent a human and cultural desert. Misshapen biological monsters and primitive nomadic tribes roam the land, while a few neofeudal barons control certain territories--for instance, "Texarkana." The only oases of learning in this new Dark Age are the monastic orders of the Roman Catholic Church, which has miraculously survived the holocaust of the "Flame Deluge," albeit with a "New Rome." The desert monastery around which this book revolves is Leibowitz Abbey.

Its patron saint, the Blessed Martyr Leibowitz (canonized in the course of the novel), was an electronics engineer strangled and roasted alive by the mob in the anti-scientist massacres following the Flame Deluge. Among the memorabilia which the monastery preserves are scraps of books and diagrams that gradually result in the rediscovery of electricity and other appurtenances of the "Golden Age'' of the 20th century. Proud as Jove, the blind earthlings hurl the megatons all over again. At novel's end, a picked band of the monks, bravely singing old space chanteys, boards a "starship" for outer space and another of man's eternal second chances.

Author Miller proves himself chillingly effective at communicating a kind of post-human lunar landscape of disaster. His faith in religious faith is commendable but not compelling. It is difficult to tell whether he believes that better bomb shelters or more Roman Catholics are the hope of the world. On the flyleaf of Canticle for Leibowitz, Novelist Miller writes, "A dedication is only a scratch where it itches." Intellectually speaking, so is his book.

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