Watery Grave

THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN by Robert Merle. 320 pages. Simon and Schuster. $5.95. Translated from the French by Helen Weaver.

The perilously heavy burden of this thriller is that two dolphins have been taught to speak and read English. They are tricked by orgspooks of a U.S. in telligence agency into blowing up an American warship in order to goad the country into starting World War III. The dolphins, friendly and lovable Beasts, are deeply hurt when they learn of the deception, and conclude that human beings are not worth much.

On the evidence given in the novel, this judgment of mankind is accurate. The book's human beings-- except for a few dolphinlike characters necessary to the plot--are consistently sub-cetaceous in intelligence, honor, aquatic ability and sexual inventiveness. The dolphins are tiptop in every department, as Robert Merle, a French writer of some past distinction, is at pains to demonstrate, taking the departments one by one. In fact, in the very long sections of the book justly given over to praise for the dolphins' character and accomplishments, only two bits of dolphin lore escape specific mention. The first is that dolphins seem to be pompous moralizers. The second is that dolphins have not only learned to read and speak English, they have learned to write novels, although not very well.

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