Picaresque

JACK ROBINSON--George Beaton-- Viking ($2.50). Author "George Beaton" (a pseudonym) subtitles his picaresque novel "an adventure in two worlds" (action, ideas). Readers who find one world at a time enough to bother about can hurdle the ideas in their stride without being tripped. The story of a runaway boy's adventures among the tramps of the English countryside, the down-&-outers of London, Jack Robinson really has two narrators: the unthinking but observant boy, the almost too reflective man he afterwards becomes. Without these sessions of sad, silent thought, Jack Robinson would be a straightaway racy tale, un hampered by moral or intellectual baggage, in the fine old tradition of Tom Jones itself.

Jack's mother meant well by him, but he got so fed up with their niggardly life in a little Cheltenham shop, so eager to mix with chieftains in the wilds of South America, that one fine morning he ran away from home. Though he never got to South America he encountered plenty of wild characters. Some of them: the Cheeser, Ishmael-like religious fanatic; Kelly, the Brother of the Universal Spirit; Col. Harrison, who ran a New Jerusalem for tramps, partly because he felt like it, partly to irritate his wife; Lily, a high-class harlot, who became Jack's idealized light-o'-love; the London hermit who lived in a vacant lot and ate garbage, a onetime chartered accountant who had left wife and job because he could not stand the feeling of insecurity both gave him. Starving in London put a temporary quietus on Jack's yearning for adventure; when he had had enough he went stumbling back home, to his mother's querulous greeting: "And I'd like to know what's happened to your new tweed suit!"

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