In Pursuit of Anarchy

BELL CALL by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 317 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.

Feed a husky three-year-old at the breast? Keep an intelligent seven-year-old illegally out of school on the tendentious grounds that he hasn't yet asked to go? Permit children to defecate on the floor, Or break up the chairs in a rented, furnished house? Even the most dogmatically permissive parent or psychologist would certainly draw the line. Yet Tarl Pracket, the strange antiheroine of Bell Call, brings up her children just like that--and such is the hallucinatory power of the author that for brief instants Tarl even seems to have a valid case.

The Glorious Spoilt Children. This third novel by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, the greatly gifted New Zealand teacher and writer, displays all the qualities of style, feeling and subject matter that made her earlier books (Spinster, Incense to Idols, and the autobiographical Teacher) unforgettable. Except that this time she has pushed these qualities to an unbearable extreme, to create what is finally a fascinating and disturbing book, but a failure.

Though the novel is told mostly from the viewpoint of a middle-aged widower (and sometimes, coyly, by his wife's ghost), the central figure of Bell Call is Tarl, who is obsessed by her belief in total freedom for herself and her four children. Author Ashton-Warner has written urgently before this about the necessity of freedom in the education of young minds. "How glorious," she wrote in Teacher, "are the dirty spoilt children, never held up with fear!" But Tarl carries the idea beyond conviction to monomaniacal compulsion. "Her voice is soft with faith. Tomorrow we'll be with nature where there's no one at all In Charge. Freedom . . . oh-h-h.' "

Lost Insight. The results of this impassioned pursuit of anarchy are catastrophic for both Tarl and the novel. In her determination to keep her son Benjamin out of school, she embarks on two frantic years of hysterical defiance and evasion, finally breaks with her shadowy husband and goes to jail. She is believable at first because she is so remarkably irritating, later because her repetitious moralizing becomes so remarkably dull. She wears platitudes the way other women wear perfume, and the fact that many of them are fresh, new platitudes does not keep them from becoming stale.

Fighting such rebellious material, Author Ashton-Warner's celebrated style --a vibrantly sentient torrent of present-tense sentences and fragments--shows signs of becoming an intrusive mannerism. Bell Call has an even worse flaw.

The author's fame is founded on her unrivaled insight into the minds of children, her magical flair for conveying their diverse personalities. But, though the author insists that they are unfalteringly serene and happy, Tarl Pracket's children remain ciphers.

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