A Square Triangle

SIR WILLIAM by David Stacton. 352 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

David Stacton is a writer of historical romances who leaves out the romance. In his latest, most ambitious novel, he deals with one of history's hottest love affairs: the six-year fling of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. Stacton's irony quickly chills it.

As Stacton re-creates the romance, the adulterous lovers and the betrayed Sir William Hamilton are plain and proper people trying, in typically underplayed English fashion, to make the best of a ridiculous situation. The eternal triangle is very square. Lady Hamilton is not the usual hypersexed heroine of most historical romance; she is undersexed to the point of epicenism. Lord Nelson is a starchy puritan made all the grumpier by the loss of a good part of his body--one eye, one arm, most hair. And the cuckolded Sir William could hardly care less. His passion is antique statuary: "He had done well to put his faith in marble, for faith had made him marble in return, warmed by the sun, like honey, and grateful to the fingertips."

Stacton is a master of the epigrammatic phrase, but it ultimately proves his undoing. For a whole novel in epigrams is a feat probably no author should try. For the first 75 pages, the phrases are crisp: "A conformable heiress whose career of discreet invalidism had so recently been rounded off by the appropriate distinction of death." Thereafter, they often flag: "Sir William, who was fond of music, and so did not much care for opera." Finally they become downright flaccid: "He felt all at sea, which is not surprising, since that was where he was."

By the end of the novel, a reader may weary of rococo and itch to pull down all the grand-opera scenery in this perfectly adjusted, irritatingly smooth, eternally coy 18th century world. The novel is a scrumptious, many-layered cake, covered with the best icing, but not offering, finally, much nourishment.

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