Pieces of Eightball

WESTWARD TO LAUGHTER by Colin MacInnes. 237 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Aye, Colin Maclnnes. Yon's what comes of reading too many 18th century novels. The daft lad's gone and written one himself.

Can this be the Maclnnes who stocked his trilogy, The London Novels, with the very latest bulletins on the young, the black and the disenfranchised? Well, yes and no--and there's the problem.

At one level, Maclnnes is still knowledgeably documenting his casebook on people-exploiting-people. For beneath the mock-replica Tom Jones style, Westward to Laughter is a kind of quick history of the slave trade--a flashback, so to speak, from Maclnnes' novel of black London, City of Spades. Shooting his imitation-lace cuffs and pointing angrily from today's ghetto back to the West Indies of the 1750s, Maclnnes says, in effect: here's where it all started.

For this basically serious exercise in parody, Maclnnes adopts the young narrator-adventurer common to 18th century fiction. He is one Alexander Nairn, a pushy Scots lad but a bit of a Presbyterian prig. Alexander ships from Liverpool on a slaver carrying blacks from Africa on the final leg of their journey to West Indian sugar plantations.

Alexander's wide-eyed but not very sensitive view provides a short crarri course on the ways men have discovered to dehumanize themselves. For a start, Maclnnes and young Alexander rub the reader's nose in the flog-grog-and-vomit life of the British seaman.

Then it's time to jump ship and really get down to the business of degradation. By a simple plot twist, Alexander himself is made a plantation slave. Nor in his guided tour of slavery does Maclnnes neglect the white variety. Ex-Slave Alexander, on the run, finds refuge in a Caribbean brothel called Sans Regrets. Shades of Moll Flanders.

Maclnnes further hots up his tale with pirates, witches and a plantation owner's daughter--an 18th century Lolita, the young bitch-heroine to end all bitch-heroines. But like painted scenery, Maclnnes' skillfully assumed style devitalizes what it copies. It inhibits Westward to Laughter as Rattling Good Yarn while blunting it as Savage Satire.

Literary parody is a game of billiards, and Maclnnes has gambled on one carom too many.

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