Novels Should Not Lie

SMITH AND JONES (182 pp.)--Nicholas Monsorro/--Sloane ($3.50).

The reader is encouraged to believe that this new novel by Nicholas (The Cruel Sea) Monsarrat is about the celebrated defection of British Diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. It is an exemplar, say the publishers, of a series dramatizing issues "weighing upon men's minds in the mid-Twentieth Century."

The case of Burgess and Maclean could indeed serve as a topical framework for a fictional dramatization of the rival moral claims of East and West. Why did two members of the British Establishment opt for the enemy in the cold war and turn up in Moscow with denunciations of the civilization that produced them?

But Monsarrat's narrative soon proves puzzling. His hero is a Foreign Service security officer known as "Drill-Pig." attached as third secretary to a Western embassy, who appears to be more important than the ambassador himself. Is Mon sarrat trying to say that the necessity for security in the West has infected the whole organization and personnel of the British Foreign Service with the methods of a totalitarian state? Smith and Jones do not seem to be staking their lives on a confrontation of opposing faiths; they appear only as a couple of sexual deviates who might just as well have flitted to Ischia or any other hospitable enclave.

Only in the last word of the novel is it made clear that Smith and Jones are really a couple of Iron Curtain diplomats --and here the surprise ending pops like a paper bag--in "that strange faraway foreign capital, Ottawa." Yes, all the time they were really Communists who have defected to the West.

Checking back on the story, the reader will realize that the things that troubled him all along about Drill-Pig are really the result of deliberate contrivance: he has been hornswoggled into believing that he is being given a fictional insight into one kind of life while actually being presented with another. Monsarrat's novelistic sleight-of-hand can be excused only as a demonstration of a conviction that the code of Communism is identical with the code of freedom, and that the philosophic claims of Western civilization are only hypocrisy. The excuse seems worse than the trick.

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