Books: Hammock-Perfect

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THE BRANDONS — Angela Thirkell —Knopf ($2.50).

Best hammock reading so far this season is The Brandons, a deft tale of pixillated English gentry. Author Thirkell (August Folly, Pomfret Towers) is the at tractive, 49-year-old granddaughter of pre-Raphaelite Painter Burne-Jones, a cousin of ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and of Rudyard Kipling, who tried out many of his Just So Stories on her.

Moved to adoration by scatterbrained, widowed Lavinia Brandon's charm were the vicar, his greensick pupil and his middle-aged churchwarden. That their adoration remained dumb was due to Lavinia's blissful inability to concentrate long enough to hear them out. Nevertheless they could try to protect her from each other, from Aunt Sissie's money, from a pesky lady folklorist home from Italy, and from the consequences of her own kind deeds. Only her two grown children appreciated how little protection Lavinia needed. In the end, when her witlessness and her ability to muddle through had proved a match for each other, Mrs. Brandon looked at her lovely hands and said to her latest admirer: "I was married very young and knew very little. It's a stupid story. . . ."