Rage Against God

BACKWARD TO THE FRONT OF THE DAY by James Robson. 144 pages. Doubleday. $4.50.

Budgie Bill is not one of your ordinary English tramps. Wearing a fawn-colored overcoat with wing collars and an ancient trilby that looks like "a burst concertina," he haunts villages in the daytime and cities at night. More startling, he always walks backward and, if he pauses in his perambulations, he lies down instead of sitting.

In this grim little first novel by a 23-year-old Yorkshireman, Budgie is befriended by a 14-year-old boy and his dog Nightpoodle, by a girl who has two distinct personalities (a waif named Wendy and a whore called Olga), and by an erratic young painter. Each of them meets with personal disaster, and at the last terrified moment each sees, or thinks he sees, Budgie Bill.

It does not take long to realize that old Budgie is none other than God himself, posing this time as a wise, lovable friend to the mad and the innocent. Robson's message is that they would be just as well off without him. Indifferent to their suffering, he shuffles on backward, blinking at sunbeams and thinking thoughts like: "Each speck was a world just like ours and our world was only another speck dancing in someone else's old barn."

Robson's novel begins as a chatty account of village life that has charm reminiscent of J. D. Salinger. It soon becomes a vivid nightmare world of putrefying animal corpses and menacing gangs of anonymous attackers. In the end, Backward to the Front of the Day is unsatisfying. In his rage against God, Robson stacks so much against his human characters that they topple toward death before they fully come to life.

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