Small Marvels

By John Skow

THE SCORPION GOD by WILLIAM GOLDING 178 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

William Golding looks like every one's favorite uncle, the kind who pulls silver dollars out of your ear and is al ways just back from Tashkent. It oc curs to the reader, as he inspects Golding's wise and mischievous mug on the dust jacket, that no one has pulled silver dollars out of his ear for a long time. It used to be fun.

It still is fun. What Golding is up to in these three short novels resembles, in fact, the best of literary imaginings for children. That is, although the subjects are adult and the perceptions subtle, the author makes all the decisions, and holds the reader's hand when the traffic is heavy. This sounds irritating but isn't, because in place of decisions, Golding offers wonders. Ex cused from responsibility, the reader watches in trust and delight as these marvels pass before his eyes.

The times are ancient, or older. Golding's method, as in The Inheritors, is simply to ask himself what it could have been like in those dim times and then to imagine an answer. He conjures baking sun, heat, a river, flat, dry beds of papyrus, stillness; then buildings, a mud town, a tiny, isolated river kingdom at the moment when the old god-king dies and the succession must be established. Mating in the royal line is incestuous, and while there is a suit able princess, her brother is a sickly and unpromising ten-year-old.

An alternative presents himself: the Court Liar, a wretch who earns his wine by reciting absurdities about lands so cold that water turns hard and men's skins are white. He is quick, deadly; he kills two soldiers with a spear; the princess is fascinated; he unsettles her lewdly with suggestions of non-incest; he talks of dominion over all the king doms of the valley, and has the wit, while breaking tradition, to wrap him self in new myth; he is the quick, stinging Scorpion God. She is tempted. Egypt begins.

Two other tales; one of life in a ma triarchal hunting tribe of dawn men, the other a successful drollery about a Roman emperor plagued by a too-clever Greek slave. Nothing here echoes darkly in the mind like Golding's Lord of the Flies, nor is meant to. Small marvels have their value, and these offer an hour's pleasure.

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