Spoiled Princess

By * John Skow

THE TOWER IS EVERYWHERE by Richard Jones. 288 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $6.95.

He was widely thought to be defunct. Suddenly he is among us again, the schoolmaster's tone unmistakable, the detachable collar and know-all smile the same he wore when he disappeared several decades ago. How pleasant to become reacquainted with the Omniscient Novelist! He raps for attention and takes command, knowing that his characters cannot be trusted to display their twitches properly without his professional help and that readers need firm and expert guidance to follow what is going on.

He writes, if the Omniscient Novelist is Richard Jones, like this: "Chandler was a curious mixture of ageing philanderer and eternal bachelor; he pursued girls (in an avuncular way) the more ardently if they gave signs of rejecting him; he was exactly the man to half-pursue a girl like Marian; and Marian was exactly the girl to be half-pursued by such a man. In their own way, they had got along very well. ..." A short course in Chandler and Marian, to be supplemented with further explication as often as the author thinks necessary.

Jones is very strict. If it is his business to have insights, and the reader's place to appreciate them--well, that is not a bad division of labor. The novelist who follows this course becomes a presence in his own novel. A cinematic kind of novelizing is more fashionable now, in which the page is a movie screen, wondrous but neutral. Jones's writing is less glittery but more personal, very high-level gossip that is fascinating because, like all gossip, it defines the gossipist.

The author's theme is suitably antique: Will she or won't she? Marian is a spoiled, listless rich girl who has wandered home to Wales after a brief try at art school in London. Chandler, the man-about-London, is half-besotted with her. and Nichol, a student, is wholly so. Marian is indifferent and unassailable, the princess in the tower. Her petulance is enough to move the story forward, thereby allowing Jones to work at his real craft, which is observing people.

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