Dear Theo

By Michael Demarest

STRANGER

by Bryan Forbes Doubleday; 474 pages; $12.95

For the well-born and well-off, Cambridge University was an oasis in the wasteland of prewar Europe. Yet, for a few, the green fields were mined with sexual intrigue and high treason. For Cambridge was also a school for scandal. The most notorious Soviet spies were recruited there: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and, it turned out late last year, Sir Anthony Blunt, now deknighted and deposed as art adviser to the Queen. How, from this world of privilege, philosophy and vintage port, could the Soviets have enlisted such consummate traitors?

In Stranger, subtitled A Novel About the Fourth Man, the narrator concludes: "They picked carefully and they picked well... I feel it was no accident that their four most successful recruits were all taken from the ranks of those who considered themselves unloved." He adds: "It was the adultery of the soul that claimed most of their spare time." In this arrangement of the Cantabrigian quartet, Bryan Forbes, the English actor, director (The L-Shaped Room) and novelist, homes in onTheo Gittings, who bears a passing resemblance to Blunt. Theo, a brilliant, alienated invert who becomes a pillar of the literary establishment, is compared by critics to E.M. Forster (a fellow homosexual who issued the closet cri de coeur: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"). Theo's career as Communist agent is unraveled after his death by bestselling Writer Anthony Stern, a straight second cousin who had been his social inferior and dearest friend.

Theo is an imaginary character, though the specific details of his dilem ma are all too true. Forbes' novel is not "faction" or a thriller, but a thoughtful blend of both.

As he delves through Theo's journals and his own memories of their abutting lives, Narrator Stern etches a bleak chronicle of loneliness and lust, punctuated with quiet irony. Stern notes the perennial alibi of the spy: treachery is excusable because it is always performed in the name of humanity. The excuse is held up to the light and found "curiously selective, since few spies seem disposed to share their thefts with anybody but the Soviet Union."

Twisting through its labyrinthine course, Stranger provides vivid profiles of Burgess, Maclean and Philby, who appear as themselves, but the many-tiered novel is most affecting in its depictions of love true and false, at home, abroad and long gone. It is in these passages that the novel persuasively insinuates a chill, echoing question: The fourth man has been identified, but is there a fifth, sixth -- even an nth man out there?

"Who knows how deeply the worms have eaten?" Stern wonders. "We all think we sleep safely in our beds, the mortgage payments up to date, the house insured, the burglar alarm operative . . .

and outside, the Philbys of this world are still at large, observing us from afar, listening to us through brick walls, photographing us with lenses that pierce the night, recruiting the next crop of fellow travellers even as they discredit the old, detonating their minds with new lies." Underneath this language: Tick . . .Tick . . . Tick . . --Michael Demarest

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