Black Mischief

AT FEVER PITCH (255 pp.)--David Caute--Pantheon ($3.95).

For obvious reasons, British writers are tops when it comes to describing disintegrating empires. To do the job properly, especially in fiction, there is needed a sense of irony, a sense of loss and a sense of relief. Young (25) Novelist David Caute mixes these qualities with the authority derived from his background: he was born in Egypt, the son of a British soldier, and when he reached gun-bearing age, he served in the Gold Coast Regiment in Takoradi (Ghana), getting a good look at both British and French West Africa. The central character of his first novel, set in a British colony on the edge of independence, is Lieut. Michael Glyn, an English lad of good family and education who has no sense of vocation for his job and is emotional to the point of hysteria. This is the sort of man who has the hopeless task of working out an orderly turnover to a native government after the new country's first election.

Things end badly for both Glyn and the British forces, but that is hardly the point. What Novelist Caute shows expertly is a process of decline and fall coupled with an opposing, ominous rise that is by now the ruling cliche of half the world's troubles. The whites cannot even withdraw gracefully; they are paralyzed by native hatred that scarcely attempts to hide its emotions. And what the country faces when the British do leave is all too obvious. Kofi Bandaya, a Lumumba type, runs the People's Progressive Party with a lust for power that is at least equal to his need for humiliating the whites. His "action troopers" care as little for African lives as Hitler's cared for those of decent Germans, and a worried fellow "revolutionary" who accuses him of taking lessons from Mein Kampf meets an appropriate end. When ineffectual Lieut. Glyn has to stand off the mobs with useless native troops, his one show of Kiplingesque courage gets him into more trouble than his whole history of weakness.

At Fever Pitch is more than the substance behind the headlines. In spite of a good deal of boyishness (Author Caute seems to think that repetition is a literary virtue), an atmosphere of urgent truth plays over the book. Hopelessness is as pervasive as the debilitating climate. And black victory is as depressing in its consequences as white defeat. Certainly the British army has seldom looked so drearily ineffective, and black Africans have seldom been decked out in such deliberate cynicism.

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