TANTRIC MASSAGE FOR MR. BLAND

By Martha Duffy

British novelist Anita Brookner's 12th book comes as a welcome surprise--just when it looked as if she had settled into Barbara Pym's world of lonely females without Pym's wit and trenchant insight into character. Written from the point of view of a just retired bachelor businessman, George Bland, who becomes enthralled with a heedless, scheming young woman, A Private View (Random House; 242 pages) is not only wise but funny.

Katy Gibb is one of the better comic creations to come along in recent fiction, a moody, slovenly girl whose main weapon in life's wars is a brazen will. Bland, a decent soul at sea without his job, never does learn how she found out that the apartment across the hall from his was vacant during the tenants' vacation. She makes it her squat and him her quarry. Her national origin is never clear, nor does her array of vowel sounds provide much of a hint. But her spiritual roots are in California. She claims to be adept at ``Vibrasound, Tantric Massage, Reflexology, Chakra, Crystal Therapy, Essential Oils [her specialty], Flower Remedies, Colour Counselling-- you name it.'' Personal growth, she assures the baffled George, ``needs assistance. It needs sharing. Anything you want to share?'' What Katy wants is a big share of George's money, to stake her to a London outlet for her West Coast flimflam. For all his rapture in her, George proves to be a resistant victim. Unlike Katy's, his spirit is dull and earthbound. He remembers his own humble roots before he prospered in a packaging business, before his best friend--a carefree chap whose background was similar to his--died of cancer. As the fool in George plots marriage, the essential George--bland--walks all over London, even stopping by his dead friend's apartment in an effort to hang on to his sanity.

These are the antagonists in the love match that Brookner sets up. George watches unblinkingly as his standards go down the drain. He also looks without flinching at the object of his fixation. She has ``an unusual gift: she brought everyone to the brink of bad behaviour.'' An honest man and proud of it, he is appalled to hear himself telling her petty lies, mostly in an effort to keep her greed at bay. Meanwhile, she is a determined missionary as she rattles on about getting in touch with ``the essential self.'' Confronted with one of his respectable female friends, she asks, ``Have you considered Colour Counselling?'' When George makes an ironic reference to ``the child inside you,'' Katy corrects him with the scorn of a strict catechist: ``Within.''

George slides very far. Too solid in the end to set Katy up as a guru--she has in mind usurping his pleasant apartment--he offers her a Christmas trip to Rome instead. In the end, of course, he loses the girl, but Brookner's triumph lies in the story's resolution. Torturing his sensibilities, wasting his money, disparaging his friends, Katy nonetheless succeeds in bringing animation back to her prey. As she re-enters the void from which she came, George starts a new life.