Notable

QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym Dutton; 218 pages; $7.95

Four faceless London clerks, nearly invisible even to their employers, share an office. So vague is their work that even they are not sure exactly what it is they do. Only one thing is certain: they are about to retire, a prelude to dispiriting old age. Barbara Pym, in her first novel in 16 years, indelibly sketches this Quartet in Autumn, whose lives, spent in bedsitting rooms or empty homes, are marked with small regrets and smaller pleasures.

Letty, occasionally wondering why romance has passed her by, is careful about her appearance, the kind of woman who "saves" her new tweed suit. Marcia is eccentric and suspicious. Although she hardly eats, she constantly adds to a large hoard of tinned food; she mysteriously refers to an operation she had several years previously, little knowing that her mastectomy has become common knowledge. The two women are the first to leave, and some weeks later they are invited for a reunion luncheon by Norman and Edwin, their former officemates.

Into this quiet, ordinary situation Pym works the subtlest of nuances, endowing her characters with quiet dignity and endearing quirks. Norman is sarcastic, but he always stops just short of abrasion. Edwin, a large, docile widower, is so bland as to be almost invisible; he fills his mouth with candies and his hours with a ceaseless round of churchgoing.

It is at the reunion that Pym unobtrusively begins to peel the layers from her characters. Arriving at the office, Letty notices that the two men have spread themselves out, occupying the space that once held all four. She experiences again "the feeling of nothingness... as if she and Marcia had never existed." But her attention quickly shifts. "Looking around the room, her eyes lighted on a spider plant which she had brought one day and not bothered to take away when she left. It had proliferated; many little offshoots were now hanging down until they dangled over the radiator." Perceptions noted, then brushed aside, only to return again, create the underlying rhythm of their days, until Marcia's mental backslide brings a sharper focus. Pym charts the courses of these blameless lives, informing them with a wise, rueful compassion that is all too rare in contemporary fiction.

GOLDEN BATS AND PINK PIGEONS by Gerald Durrell Simon & Schuster; 190pages; $9.95

In the middle of the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, the island of Mauritius took several million years to develop animal forms that exist nowhere else in the world. But what nature can accomplish in eons, humanity can undo in millenniums, and that is exactly what the species Homo sapiens has done on Mauritius. By his own actions--and those of the animals he has introduced--man has already done away away the flightless black parrot, the giant Mauritian tortoise and the dodo, the huge bird whose very name has become synonymous with extinction. Now civilization threatens the rest of this island nation's rare birds and mammals.

But not if Gerald Durrell can help it. The zoologist has long maintained a sanctuary for endangered species on the English Channel Island of Jersey and has scoured the world to collect threatened birds, mammals and reptiles. In his latest book, he wittily describes his efforts to help the nonhuman population of Mauritius and neighboring islands. Durrell's adventures have an engaging lunacy that relieves their underlying tension. He and his party risked bites from golden fruit bats that objected to the indignity of having their private parts probed so their would-be saviors could ascertain their sex. They suffered seasickness and sunstroke to capture rare lizards. But to capture the cyclamen-colored Mauritian pink pigeon, all the rescuers risked was a fall from a tree. The birds proved so suicidally stupid that they merely watched, heads cocked with curiosity, as a Mauritian soldier the size of a middle linebacker climbed up a tree with all the agility of an elephant and snagged one in a net. Not all endangered species, it appears, play hard to get.

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