Books: Un-lrish Restraint

SETTLED IN CHAMBERS by Honor Tracy. 209 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Honor Tracy resembles a particularly mean Irish longshoreman on strike. Her corner-of-the-mouth wit has the fine rollicking belligerence that keeps everyone within eavesdropping distance of the drunk at the end of the bar. But sure, Honor is a bit of a fraud. The fist she brandishes so threateningly is really papier-mache. Her secret problem is that she is a satirist who faints at the sight of blood. Her seventh novel has all the brilliance of an expertly pulled punch.

The target is a particularly tempting and well-authorized one for Irish assassins from Swift to Shaw: the smug face of English hypocrisy, personified in this case by a sanctimonious divorce judge named Sir Toby Routh. His fiercely prudish sermons from the bench drive adulterers to suicide and his wife to drink. He is as pompous a prig as ever rode a Rolls to work and pride to a fall. But the only tumble Miss Tracy gives him is into the downy bed of Gerda Trauenegg, a well-tuned opera singer from Vienna. Catching him with his wig down, Gerda momentarily taps a streak of puritanical lechery.

Miss Tracy firmly skewers Sir Toby on her hook, then lets him off. Instead of savaging him as he deserves, she plays plot games with the side question: Will the antiadultery adulterer get caught? Or else she putters about with the stock characters of English comedy: a gossip columnist straight out of Evelyn Waugh, a giddy old upper-class biddy of the sort invariably played by Margaret Rutherford.

Once or twice Miss Tracy tentatively enters upon her own appraisal of adultery, then apologetically backs off ("Everyone seems to do it now. I wonder hey don't call it something else"). Settled in Chambers ends up tamely with all the conventional comedy answers and one big question: What lace-curtain gentility, what damnable tact keeps lonor Tracy from finally ripping through? The book earns its solid quota of middle-volume laughter, but its uthor remains cursed by an un-Irish 'emon of cautious restraint.