Books: High Currency

RATES OF EXCHANGE by Malcolm Bradbury Knopf; 310 pages; $13.95

He is fortyish, a bit bedraggled, quizzically bemused. He is a professor at a provincial English university, bright in his specialty, perhaps, but farcically inept in worldly matters. He tries to uphold the values of humane liberalism but keeps misplacing them, and occasionally wonders sadly whether they exist any more.

This, in various incarnations, is the prototypical figure who has shambled through all the cracklingly intelligent, funny novels of Britain's Malcolm Bradbury, 51. He appeared as a department chairman undermined by the Beat Generation in Eating People Is Wrong (1960); as a writer-in-residence vainly trying to go American in Stepping Westward (1966); and as a bystander steamrollered by trendy, sociology-spouting radicals in The History Man (1976).

Now, in Rates of Exchange, Bradbury recasts him as Angus Petworth, a linguistics scholar on a lecture tour of Slaka, the capital of an imaginary but all too plausible East European country. Among Petworth's topics: the difference between "I don't have" and "I haven't got."

Lecturing is the least of the cultural exchanges in which Petworth engages. Struggling with Slaka's implacable bureaucracy, he plays an unwitting role in its intrigues and treacheries, despite the best efforts of his fond, exasperated official guide. He falls victim to the local peach brandy (rot'vitti), causing a sensation in a nightclub with an impromptu striptease. He attracts more than the routine attention of the state security police (HOGPo) as well as of most of the women he encounters, from the nymphomaniac wife of a British diplomat to a "magical realist" Slakan novelist who seduces him in a shower, quoting Marx and Freud all the while. "Do you think it is possible to make a dialectical synthesis?" the novelist says. "If we do it well, it might not produce a false consciousness."

If Bradbury's narration of these misadventures seems notably oblique, it is because he is up to something other than the usual picaresque of an academic innocent abroad. His book is, in fact, an intricately witty gloss on linguistics and structuralism, if not on the novel-writing process itself. The dislocations and arbitrariness of all things Slakan are meant to evoke a world without fixed meanings. Everywhere Petworth sees "the sign floating free of the signified." Nearly everyone in the country speaks some English, but it is not English as Petworth knows it ("Now, Pervert," a desk clerk mumbles, "this card I write for you, it is your hotel identay'ii, ja?"). Through Petworth's perplexities with words—and with such other languages as sex, politics and food—Bradbury suggests that life is rather like a monetary system. It can proceed only by a kind of barter, a series of provisional transactions aimed at "making a trade, finding an equivalent, striking a bargain, forging a value."