Books: Carib Rib

A NUMBER OF THINGS (248 pp.)—Honor Tracy—Random House ($3.95).

In this patchy, fast-paced comic novel, Irish-Scottish Honor Tracy emerges as a satirist wielding bludgeon and scalpel in defense of the Establishment—that in domitable, mutual-aid group of clergy, big business and old school ties who rule Britain, no matter who wins the elections. Her hero, a proper and rather priggish young Briton named Henry Lamb, is sent to Trinidad in the West Indies as correspondent of Torch, a lit’ry weekly “that’s going to teach us all to live.” In Trinidad, gushes Torch’s lisping editor, “the dwegs and outcasts of the community now are forging a destiny of their own. Minds wuthlessly depwived for centuwies are finding valid art forms.”

In her previous books (The Straight and Narrow Path, Silk Hats and No Breakfast), Author Tracy has savaged Irish clergymen and patriots, Spanish politicians and bureaucrats. In her new locale, the lush, sun-smitten Caribbean, she lays about her with equal ferocity, whacking British do-gooders and culture vultures, U.S. tourists “with their national air of being permanently engaged in relief work,” and the swaggering, capering West Indians, who are lambasted as fake primitives, phony intellectuals and adult delinquents.

But, like her hero, most readers will succumb to Author Tracy’s finest creation: nubile Candida Firebrace, a velvet-eyed Calypso shouter whose hymn to the Christ Child runs:

You and Me,

We’re just vital statistics—

That Baby is boss of the world!

Already a member of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, lovely Candida is also enrolled in an evangelical sect called Pilgrim Zeal, which has promised her a trip to their holy of holies: Minneapolis, Minn. Candida races about the islands with the enraptured but platonic Henry (her only proviso: “We must not make a baby!”). She involves him in punching a local union leader in the jaw and horsewhipping an editor. The timid colonial government claps Henry into jail and ships him off as a bundle for Britain.

The headlong clatter of A Number of Things is occasionally slowed by pages of travel-book writing, and the jokes are sometimes tasteless as well as brash. Sir Manfred Schulz, for instance, and his “Vot’s dat?” wife seem as xenophobic as anything in Saki’s short stories. But Author Tracy also shares with Saki a grand and grisly way with a funny anecdote, as when a decorous lawn party belatedly realizes that the West Indian gardener who lopes by is carrying in his hand not a melon, but the severed head of the cook. Before he is carted off to jail, forlorn Henry decides that the contemporary world is one where virtue and vice are “superseded by Good Public Relations and Bad.” Even more catastrophic is his final moment of revelation: “We’re all West Indians.”