Who's Really Who?

CARDS OF IDENTITY (370 pp.)--Nigel Dennis--Vanguard ($3.75).

That wretched Mrs. Chirk, she had forgotten her name again! Once it had really been Finch, but after what seemed a lifetime of being miscalled "Chirk" in National Health Service waiting rooms "Chirk" stuck. Not for long, though. "Poor soul," says one character about her, "I wonder when she last knew herself." "Probably never," replies another. "One would probably have to go back to her grandfather to find an identity that really made an impression on her."

Modern mankind is Mrs. Chirk. That is the thesis which British Novelist Nigel Dennis, a contributing editor of TIME brilliantly defends in one of the funniest most penetrating novels since the early Aldous Huxley. Once upon a time (perhaps in grandfather's day), says Author Dennis in effect, a man's Self was his castle. There might be an occasional siege of sin, and the drawbridge to the outer world might get tangled in confusion, but the Self itself stood fast. It was kept in place (like Bishop Berkeley's tree in the quad) by God, or at least by church custom or class. Today, the selves are multiplying like amoebae, and a man with only one is downright backward. Man's identity was scooped out of its solid container by the Machine, spattered all over the place by psychoanalysis, and is being scraped up, in denatured form by the modern state. "Governments all over the world . . . give you cards, on which they inscribe in capital letters the name which your fading memory supplies before it is too late . . ."

Character Sculpture. Master dealer of identity cards is one Captain Mallet the guiding spirit of an extraordinary organization calling itself the Identity Club. Its members used to be mere psychoanalysts, but they have gone far beyond exploring the Self: they have learned instead, to supply their patients with "the identities they can use best." This crew moves into Hyde's Mortimer, an abandoned English country seat (it has lost its identity, too) for the club's annual convention. A task force under Captain Mallet recruits a domestic staff of local people. In almost no time, the frantic overworked village doctor is persuaded that he is really happier as a loutish gardener ("The whole nation is on its last legs," he shrieks, "or rather on its doctors'!"). Poor but genteel Miss Paradise and her brother are so skillfully transformed by Captain Mallet that they forget they are related, and settle down happily as housekeeper and butler. The process of persuasion--a proposition of mind over no-matter--is gentle and artistic. With the sensitivity of great sculptors, the identity changers mold a pride here, add an envy there, knead habits into place. In naming a butler, for instance: "We begin with the premise that every butler believes he was born to command a fleet . . . But Nelson was too common a name . . . Beatty. . . too rowdy for a butler. The same for Mountbatten. But in Jellicoe you found everything--a bellicose, echoing, challenging suggestion discreetly balanced by an opening syllable indicative of a nature congealed and wobbly."

Mr. Paradise, now happy as Jellicoe the butler, puts it neatly: "It's being led that matters. You lose your head if people aren't sitting on it."

Intellectual Vaudeville. When the big brains among the club members read their case histories of changed identities, Author Dennis shows himself at his best. Vinson's is a sad case. Back from the war he finds the old England swept away: "All the initials have gone from inside the bowler hats." With mystic joy he accepts the unpaid, unwanted post of Co-Warden of the Badgeries, an ancient symbolic office whose sole relic is a stuffed badger. Hardly has his new identity begun to cover him when he is killed as he falls on a pike during a symbolic parade to the glory of symbolic England that was. Just as sad is the case of the man so sexually unidentified that he wrote "Church of England" against the word sex on an application form. Men and women have so merged their natural identities, thinks Author Dennis, that "nowadays one must choose between being a woman who behaves like a man, and a man who behaves like a woman." There comes a day when a rogue who is registered as sexually "Undetermined" claims extra cheese from the Food Office as a nursing mother.

Novelist Dennis will give no comfort to those who simply want to cling to familiar values. He laughs at everybody, including ex-Communists and the church. But he writes neither in sorrow nor in anger and achieves not so much a traditional novel as a rather special entertainment, with intellectual vaudeville acts now and then stopping the story cold. In the end, the Identity CIub breaks up in unseemly haste when a cop drops in for a look around. The blazing, devilish farce is over, a nightmare so cleverly contrived and keenly written that the reader who looks only for the great fun in it will miss some of modern fiction's sharpest comments on the human condition.

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