Instant Replay

By LANCE MORROW

MALEVIL

by ROBERT MERLE 575 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

A group of Frenchmen, most of them old friends, are gathered one morning in the wine cellar of Emmanuel Comte's 13th century castle, a feudal relic named Malevil. Abruptly the noise of jackhammering doom breaks loose, followed by suffocating heat. Civilization is gone in a nuclear flash. In Comte's castle, after some flirting with suicide, the microcosmic band of friends sets about reinventing society.

The surprise is that French Novelist (The Day of the Dolphin) Robert Merle's premise should yield such an entertaining and cheerful novel. Anyone who has read Herman Kahn, with his printouts of megadeaths, or the other prophets who have envisioned post-Bomb races of savage mutants hotfooting it across the radioactive countryside, might have concluded that nuclear holocaust is not much fun at all.

A providentially handy Geiger counter assures Merle's survivors that the doomsday Bomb was at least a "clean" one. Some livestock have survived, along with a supply of gram, guns, the wine cellar and Comte's collection of shirts, which sounds as opulent as Jay Gatsby's. Malevil's tribe establishes a sort of feudal agrarian Communism. The band soon discovers that a scattering of other people near by have also survived the holocaust, among them some young women, who conveniently become Malevil's communal wives and future breeding stock. A band of loot ers begins devouring Malevil's newly sprouting wheat, the key to its survival, and so massacre is reinvented. There are no bleeding hearts after the Bomb -- Comte is nature's true reactionary.

Merle, a Frenchman who teaches English at the Sorbonne, is shrewd in his development of Comte as a benevolent Machiavellian. To counter a marauding band armed with a bazooka, Comte sets about re-creating the art of war. To deal with a neighboring town of survivors ruled by a pseudo priest named Fulbert, Comte recovers the art of diplomacy and the balance of power.

The new world is dangerously imperfect. There are no doctors, and so Comte dies of routine appendicitis. He becomes an object of mythic veneration, a Mao Tse-tung of the new age. In a post script -- one has seen it coming a hun dred pages away -- a successor notes that his fellow survivors have voted "that practical research into the manufacture of .36 rifle bullets should be instituted immediately and given top priority." And so on. But post-apocalypse society is fun while it lasts.

sbLance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.