The Beast in the Jungle

THE BAMBOO BED by William Eastlake. 350 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.50.

William (Castle Keep) Eastlake has visited Southeast Asia twice since 1966, but no one could be less of a war-correspondent novelist. In The Bamboo Bed, he approaches the struggle in Viet Nam not as a three-dimensional event but as the frighteningly abstract piece of surrealism that we all share on the evening news. Black comedy, myth, shaggy parables of the top secrets of the human heart--these are the literary forms war takes for Eastlake.

At the center of Eastlake's brilliantly grotesque fantasy swaggers Captain Clancy. Clancy wears a Roman helmet with the red, white and blue parrot plume. Clancy is prepared to draw his sword and lead a charge at the drop of a paradiddle from his native drummer boy. Clancy is Eastlake's personification of the Viet Nam war. Clancy, in fact, is war. Never asking why, he leads his men up those lonely, death-strewn Viet Nam hills, and as long as Clancy is leading, his troops don't ask why either. But then Clancy imperceptibly cracks.

It may be Madame Dieudonne in her bamboo bed--Viet Nam and life at its languorous, loving best--who softens Clancy and does the implacable warrior in. Eastlake does not say. Whatever the cause, Clancy tarnishes his hero's image and lets down his troops as well. Deep in a forest he dies a slow, solitary death, while both his own side and the Viet Cong hunt for him as if he possessed some solution to the war, or perhaps to life itself.

Eastlake, unlike the old-school war novelists, never divorces the two. War is not the madness that contradicts life but only the extreme insanity that confirms life's other irrationalities. As he describes Clancy being tracked down, Eastlake's quest is to understand why war figures as a sort of final test. War, he concludes, is the confrontation to end all confrontations, not only between men but between a man and himself. It is mortality at its most unbearable--life with "death ticking off inside."

Pro-Life Ecstasy. By way of contrast to Clancy, the author introduces Captain Knightbridge, a pilot who circles in his search-and-rescue helicopter above the Viet Nam jungle, making extraordinary love to a pretty nurse at 5,000 ft. This non-murderous behavior--this pro-life ecstasy--is an improvement on war. But sex, Eastlake seems to imply regretfully, is no adequate substitute for violence. "People don't want to be rescued," he says. They want to be saved, and salvation is what Clancy's charges uniquely promise: doom and salvation in one package. As Eastlake sardonically puts it: "History is a record of people committing suicide . . . Death is the great problem solver."

Like a volcano sucking in human sacrifices, Eastlake's war engulfs everyone who comes near it--including two trustful flower children wandering through the jungle with a guitar and a button reading "I have a dream." Even they are not pure victims. Love and life may perhaps be enough for women, Eastlake sadly suggests. But men all share a terrible curiosity: What beast --or possibly what hero--will they turn into at their moment of private reckoning with the war?

The desolating terms of Eastlake's argument seem to leave no philosophic exit. A funny book, a bitter book, The Bamboo Bed produces no hopeful answers. In their place Eastlake submits the lyric, sensuous presence of life absurdly singing on, like the birds in the Viet Nam jungle.

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