Mixed Fiction

STORY FOR ICARUS, by Ernst Schnabel (313 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4.75), is a mythological novel about Queen Pasiphae's untidy love affair with the great white bull of Crete. Although the ancient Greeks were seldom squeamish about aberrant sex, even they recoiled from this particular caper--which resulted in the birth of the Minotaur, a dull-witted monster with a human body and a bull-like head. In the novel, Daedalus the artificer indignantly denies the part attributed to him by legend--the construction of a cunningly made wooden cow in which Pasiphae concealed herself to approach the bull. Lies, all lies, says Daedalus. What he did instead was to create the famed labyrinth of Knossos for Pasiphae's husband, King Minos, and assist the wryly saddened King in his search for an authentic hero.

A hero duly appears in Theseus, Crown Prince of Athens, who is nearly as phony as he is fearless. He captivates Ariadne, the King's favorite daughter, slays the flabby, aging white bull, and kills the Minotaur with all the aplomb of Manolete--performing veronicas and chictielinas with Ariadne's red shawl, finally thrusting home the sword. Daedalus and his son Icarus make their escape from crumbling Knossos with wings fashioned of wax and bird feathers. The boy's wings are almost more beautiful than his father's, and they carry him farther--to death itself.

In this retelling of the legend, German-born Author Schnabel (best known for his Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage) plows the same classical field as Mary Renault (The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die), with somewhat less literary skill--at least in translation. His book conceals classical jokes to amuse scholars, and is occasionally marred by the free use of contemporary speech--there are "commissars" in tyrannical Egypt and "poker-playing" sailors. But Schnabel has a Conradian sense of nature and the imminence of catastrophe. An ironic inquirer into the heart's reasons, he does not pretend that past and present--or even men--are always the same, but he tries to show that the great questions do not change. "What matters," says King Minos, "is a man's life and the verdict passed upon it." Who delivers the verdict? Poets, the gods, the man himself. Should he achieve greatness, posterity will keep his name in myth or history. If not, he wanders for all time in oblivion.

THE ICE IN THE BEDROOM, by P. G. Wodehouse (246 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $3.75), is the latest work from the pen of the writer whom Sean O'Casey once described as "English literature's performing flea." At 79, the old flea is amazingly spry--he still writes a novel a year, and in this one he dances as nimbly as ever he did on the standard English pinhead.

The pinhead in this case is a young aristoclot called Freddy Widgeon. Poor Freddy. He has been enrolled by his wealthy, tyrannical uncle, Lord Blicester (pronounced Blister), as "a wage slave in a solicitor's firm, as near to being an office boy as makes no matter." Freddy is limply determined to escape to Kenya and become a "coffee king," but he has to earn a few beans before he can plant any, and this involves 246 pages of wild but cheerful complications. Among them: a girl named Sally, whom Freddy considers "the biggest thing since sliced bread," a lady novelist who smokes cigars, a snake named Mabel, and the ice in the title--which happens to be hot.

From blurb to backflap, P. G. never misses a Wodehouse trick. His names ("Oofy" Prosser is the villain, J. Sheringham Adair is the private eye) are felicitously goofy. His "floaters" ("I wouldn't kiss her with a ten-foot pole!") are a caution. His puns ("A fete worse than death") are outrageous. His hyperbole ("Carpets of so thick a nap that midgets would get lost in them and have to be rescued by dogs") is ingenious. His cliches ("The shot's not on the board, old dear") click with an exquisite remoteness in the modern ear, like ghostly billiard balls in country houses far away and long ago.

The vision of an England where the pound is steady, the sun is usually shining and the club goes on forever is perhaps essentially the daydream of a perennial expatriate; Wodehouse has spent two-thirds of his adult life in the U.S. But the author builds his country houses in the air with such zest, charm and comic invention that they are always worth the price of the tour.

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