Uncle Harry's Isle

POMP & CIRCUMSTANCE (308 pp.)--Noel Coward-- Doubleday ($4.50).

Noel Coward once hymned a certain Poor Uncle Harry, who wanted to be a missionary and who sailed to the South Seas. "The natives," Coward's saga went,

. . . greeted him kindly, and invited

him to dine

On yams and hams and human hands

and vintage cocoanut wine,

The taste of which was filthy, but the

after-effects divine . . . Uncle Harry's not a missionary now.

Coward returns to Harry's wicked island, or one just like it, in what turns out to be, surprisingly enough, this all-round entertainer's first novel, written at 60. Years have passed, and less corruptible missionaries have done their work in Samolo.* The natives now dine on the tourists' bounty, not on the tourists. In fact, the place has become so civilized that it possesses a Royal Governor, a fairly intricate gin-drinking plantocracy, and is an important enough bastion of empire to occasion a visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

It is this royal advent that sets the author's characters in violent and generally entertaining motion. (The characters are named Bimbo and Bunny and Cuckoo and Buddha, as they always are in British light fiction. No one knows why, just as no one knows why characters in U.S. ladies' fiction are all named Brett and Brick and Brack and Blade.) The tizzies in which the islanders become involved may be trivial--can anyone really fret about the problems of a cuckolded duke if he is called Droopy?--but they are enjoyed by all hands, including the author.

Coward at his best--and there are patches in this somewhat lengthy foolishness when he is not--means dialogue that is blithe and blithery: "'I don't want to go to Jane's,' said Maisie. 'She gets even drunker than I do. The last time I dined there, she sat in a fruit salad.' 'Perhaps she'll do it again if we hurry.' Michael gripped her firmly by the arm. 'Come along.'" Most readers will come along happily enough.

*The author puts his island in the southwest Pacific, possibly to forestall conclusion-jumping by neighbors in Jamaica, where Coward now spends most of his winters.

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