Books: Poor Little Sod the Sioux

The photograph on the dust jacket will look familiar to devotees of British comic films, and with good reason. Irene Handl, now 82, appeared with Peter Sellers in I'm All Right, Jack (1960) and with Terry-Thomas in Make Mine Mink (1960); she also played the deranged hero's mother in Morgan! (1966), in which she made a dottily poignant pilgrimage to the London grave of Karl Marx. In addition to these and other movie roles, plus extensive work in the theater and television, Handl found the time to write a novel. The Sioux was first published in 1965 and elicited glowing responses from the likes of Noel Coward and Daphne du Maurier. After initial flurries of praise, though, the book sank out of print. Now publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to give it another chance.

The Sioux certainly deserves that, if only as a tribute to reckless originality. A stranger tale and an odder telling would be hard to confect. Vincent Castleton, 43, an English banker in New Orleans, has married Marguerite Benoir, also known as Mim or Mimi to the handful of people on earth she regards as equals. These include most of the Benoirs, an impossibly rich and haughty French clan whose members call themselves the Sioux, perhaps as a tribute to their own ferocity. Mim, in her mid-20s, has led a luxurious but troubled life. Her first marriage, to Cousin Georges Benoir, ended in a car crash that killed one of the world's most dashing multimillionaires and the father of her son. Her second union, to a Governor of Mississippi named Davis Davis, proved a three-month debacle. Her honeymoon with Castleton has been acceptable; now she anxiously awaits the arrival of her older brother Armand, who is bringing her delicate little boy back from France to live with his newest stepfather.

Young Georges-Marie, 9, has, as his cousin Bienville tartly notes, "more names than Jehovah," among them Moumou, Puss and the Dauphin. This spectrally beautiful, thin, pale child speaks a bewildering mixture of French and "Ol' Kintuck," the hayseed dialect he absorbed during his brief exposure to Governor Davis' three strapping sons: "O, he jest being plain bad. O, il m'echappe toujours!" All the Sioux are holding their breath to see how George takes to Castleton. Armand reassures his brother-in-law: "The Dauphin has a truly terrifying sense of gratitude. You'll be annihilated by it, my poor Vince. Nothing can stand up against this terrible, slow gratitude of the Dauphin."