Cold and Grey

THE PARADOX PLAYERS by Maureen Duffy. 221 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

This is a good book that perhaps only an Englishman could love. Miss Duffy's novel deals with the struggles of a young writer who lives on a houseboat moored in the Thames. Separated from his wife and child, mired in an unpromising literary career, he tries to find himself by casting off the paraphernalia of modern life. His boat turns out to be rot-ridden and spider-struck. Every night cats and rats perform a dance of death on his cabin roof. Worse, the free spirits whom he expected to find among other houseboat owners turn out to be frauds or escapists.

For that matter, Author Duffy fails to establish that her hero has much spark himself ("He still hadn't learned not to make that kind of demand, not to ask for a relationship of dependence rather than one of equals face to face"). Even so, British critics have compared the author to Virginia Woolf, noting that both have the knack of tuning the physical world precisely to the pitch of the characters' emotions.

Miss Duffy has a special talent for describing landscape, seascape and weather. But a sea that is always cold and grey and a climate so English that "the morning wept over them" become a too mournful refrain to the novel's dreary proceedings. Next time her hero should try the South Seas.

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