Write for Your Life

WHEN THE ENEMY IS TIRED by Russell Braddon. 251 pages. Viking. $5.95.

"This is a touching little tale."

"I'm a touching little author."

A creative-writing teacher and a smart-alecky student? No. A Chinese major and a captive Australian colonel. The time is 1975, and the colonel is a victim of the old Chinese ball-point torture. He has been given three pens and ordered to write the story of his life up to the age of 20, starting with the first things he remembers. Object of the exercise: not make-do Adlerian therapy but a complete brainwash. "What I must do in the weeks that follow," warns his interrogator before applying the autobiographical wringer, "is find your moment of worst pain. . .during your childhood. . .and make you relive it. Then when you absolve yourself of all adult responsibilities, I shall pick you up."

The matter of this small, strangely schizophrenic novel literally becomes the colonel's own sentences, his semifictional forays into his own Aussie boyhood during the '20s and '30s. Gingerly he launches into an account of life with his upper-class Sydney family: a barrister father, a tennis-playing mother, "unforgettable-character" grandparents, a funny, Christian Science-spouting sister. The result is a tender exercise in memory quite touching in its own right. Even the Chinese interrogator soaks it all up with pleasure. Then he uses it in a hyperbolic scene that involves hypnotizing the colonel and forcing him to watch what he believes are the executions of fellow prisoners by grisly means suggested from episodes in his own past.

Brainwashing, especially in the wake of the Pueblo experience, remains a timely subject. And Braddon's theme--that the personality with the surest sense of itself is most likely to survive--is persuasive enough. But in much the same way, the novel that best succeeds is the novel that best knows itself. Unfortunately, the author has tried to set what is essentially a muted memoir in a superstructure of futuristic wartime drama. Braddon's you-are-what-you-remember message would have had more power if presented with less literary artifice.

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