Poor Nellie

DARK PLACES OF THE HEART by Christina Stead. 352 pages. Holf, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

Perhaps Christina Stead's latest book should not be reviewed, but exorcised. It purports to be a novel of British working-class life, but its overt socialist propaganda and its covert hints of dark doings in sex and some sort of spiritualism make it the queerest mixture of the publishing season--a marriage of those diverse London oddballs, Karl Marx and Joanna Southcott, the hysteric cultist who died in 1814 after announcing that she would give birth to a second Prince of Peace.

"The fraudulence is fascinating" say the publishers, and it is even more fascinating than they admit. On the surface, this novel by the well-praised author of The Man Who Loved Chil dren (TIME, April 2, 1965) is a finely if lushly written story about Nellie Cotter, a left-wing journalist and later a raffish London bohemian. Nellie is the most forceful character in the Cotter family, whose life offers a sad insight into the awful milieu of the British working class in the industrial landscape of the Tyneside. A feast for the Cotters is one chicken in the pot, brought to the boil in saltless water and garnished with some dreadful cabbage; the local preoccupations are football pools, the union and the Labor Party, which replaced (but not satisfactorily) the chapel. The family Bible of the Cotter tribe, awash with tea and sympathetic misery, seems to be those old socialist classics--Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Lenin's The

State and Revolution, and Robert Blatchford's Merrie England.

Attendant SprriK The Cotters' England is also a very odd place; it is a place with a socialist government dedicated to equal bureaucracy for all, and at the same time a place where Stonehenge during the midsummer solstice is officially closed to tourists in favor of ac credited witches, warlocks and their attendant spirits.

Nellie combines these anomalies in her own gangling, loquacious person. She has a job with a London newspaper that may or may not be the Daily Worker. She gives this up to marry a rising young labor organizer, George Cook. At the same time, she nurtures incestuous feelings for her brother Tom, who is "like a painted Christ in a blue and pink oleo," a mystic, a pacifist and a lady-killer who bums around the countryside with a harpy seeking faith cures for her cancer. He gets to feel that he is something of a healer himself, and sees people who are not there. For a while, this unpleasant freak and sister Nellie attend something called "the Jago circle," "playing at vice" and "doing things the bourgeoisie don't dare," though what this could be is anybody's guess.

Wine & Winqs. George deserts Nellie and the workers' cause by taking a job in Europe as some sort of bureaucrat and acquiring a taste in wine and tailor-made clothes. Nellie declines in her London lodgings, where she takes to crooning about her soul ("Oh me great black and rosy wings!"), and where from time to time, naked women dance in the rear of the premises. George, serves him right, is killed in a skiing accident. Nellie is last seen entering a mysterious house that shelters some cult in search of the "Unknowable."

No doubt there is more in the novel than meets the eye. Most of the important events take place offstage, but what does go on is baffling enough. Is Nellie head of a spirtualist cell or a covin? It is certainly one of the most peculiar books ever written by a novelist of undoubtedly great talents.

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