Office Party

THE LAST HOURS OF SANDRA LEE (254 pp.)--William Sansom-- Little, Brown ($4).

Sandra seemed the siren type: grey eyes, heavy with green mascara, smoldering in a flawless, poreless expanse of Pancake. From beneath this feral exterior peeked a girl who had never gone wrong--and regretted it. And now faithful old Bun Stanbetter, a handsome electrical engineer, suddenly wanted to marry her and carry her off to his new job in Sarawak.

Marriage to Bun would be wonderful, of course, "but it would be all twice as wonderful if something had happened first . . . something outrageous, something terrible, something exciting, something even just bad.'' Sandra yearned for a past with which to face the future, and here it was, the day of the Christmas office party.

What happened in that cosmic bacchanal to Sandra Lee and her colleagues at the cosmetic company is the sum and substance of this novel by William Sansom, a versatile British writer of travel books (The Icicle and the Sun), novels (The Loving Eye) short stories and TV plays.

Sandra practices her sirenship on Sales Manager Mansford, whose wife is pregnant; his reaction to her experimental kiss is to be sick with guilt in a carton of perfume. She even takes her clothes off and manages to get them on again before anyone really notices. Moments of truth rain devastatingly down on one and all.

Under the influence of a prodigious assortment of Christmas bottles--ginger wine, Irish whisky, Portuguese claret, South African sherry, rum, port, eggnog, "Pineapple Fortified" and ale--Sandra is provided with a bit of past for her future.

Writing with a wry, sure sense of absurdity, the author proves again that he is a superb literary entertainer. As a social satirist, Sansom is no Samson but his deft dialogue demonstrates that he can do considerable damage to the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

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