Babes in Nomads' Land

THE SPIDER'S HOUSE (406 pp.)--Paul Bowles--Random House ($3.95).

Novelist Paul Bowles likes to paralyze his characters in the opening pages and then devour them at leisure. The paralytic agents are 20th century emptiness and despair. The devouring usually takes place in North Africa, a nomads' land where U.S. Novelist Bowles has roved for more than two decades. Like his highly praised The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down, the latest Bowles novel is less about the clash of cultures than about the de cline of both West and East.

The hero of The Spider's House is a dilettante culture vulture named John Stenham. In present-day French Morocco, he resents the growing web of tension, intrigue and violence spun by the French and the Arabs. A neutralist esthete in love with his romantic image of the Arabs as a race of noble and religious savages, he does not want the French to keep Morocco or the nationalists to take it.

To grey-eyed Polly Veyron, an American girl on an extended fling to whom everything is "so exciting," Stenham looks pretty exciting, but cranky, too. Polly's head is stuffed with progressive sawdust, but her personality seems to have been forged at U.S. Steel. Her idea of mixing fun and politics is to give an Arab boy enough money to go out and buy himself a revolver. The boy in question is named Amar--cousin to Kipling's wily quiz kid, Kim. He makes a good deal of The Spider's House into a kind of child's garden of Allah.

The Spider's House simmers with the sense of grievance felt by the Arabs against the French. "If you could not have freedom, you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now." The setting alone lends special interest to the book, and Author Bowles brings the Moroccan locale to life with meticulous realism. If his cast of characters has a cosmetic blush that suggests not the novelist's but the embalmer's art, that is a quality which fans of Bowles's rather special fiction have long since learned to enjoy.

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