Books: Pilgrim's Progress

THREE CHEERS FOR ME (274 pp.) —Donald Lamont Jack—Mocmillan ($4.50).

In his time, Donald Lamont Jack, 38, has served in the Royal Air Force, worked as a salesman, freight checker, surveyor, typist, packer in a department store, and a music critic, studied art and the theater, flopped as an actor and written with only modest success for the theater, movies and TV. Donald Lamont Jack can now stop groping around for an occupation: he is a talented comic novelist.

Jack's hero in Three Cheers for Me is Bartholomew Bandy, whose long and inscrutably deadpan face exasperates everyone who lays eyes upon it. Bandy's blank exterior hides nothing but innocence. Son of a Canadian cleric, he is unsullied by liquor or women. But then Bandy goes off to fight in World War I and lurches into manhood like a drunk stumbling down a flight of stairs—always headed in the right direction but never quite in control of himself or the situation.

Lieut. Bandy learns about liquor when he is sent off on a trench raid with a canteen filled with rum: magnificently drunk, he loses his bearings, raids his own trench, and kidnaps his colonel. Bandy needs all of his Christian resolve to avoid being seduced by a pillow-breasted wench: "She clutched her arms around my head, burying my face even deeper in her bosom until my nose was bent almost double against her sternum and her nipples were stuck in my earholes like a stethoscope."

At his best, Author Jack is as droll as the early Evelyn Waugh he so obviously admires. The book has some fine set pieces of English comic writing: e.g., Bandy's defeat at the hands of an antique bathtub armed with such fixtures as "Douche, Spray, Wave, Plunge, Hot, Cold, Shower, Fountain, Plug, Waterfall and Sprinkler." But Author Jack does more than play it for laughs. Men die on barbed wire and a hand sticks out of the water in the bottom of a shell hole. ("It seemed to be waving at us cheerfully. Rollo shook hands with it.") This mingling of humor and horror is like a clown tap-dancing on a coffin, but Jack is skill ful enough to get away with it.