Today's Allegory

MEN OF STONES (219 pp.)--Rex Warner--Lipprncoft ($2.75).

Rex Warner, 44, is a onetime British schoolmaster whose personal bogeyman has by now become that of most men of good will: the cynical assumption of the dictators that mankind fears nothing so much as freedom and longs for nothing so much as to be asked for blind political obedience. Men of Stones is Warner's fifth novel of worried warning.

Like the others it is a skillful, dramatic allegory in which each character becomes an effective symbolic puppet. Like the others it deals with unpalatable human possibilities, but like most allegories it induces fairy-tale shivers instead of moral indignation.

Prostrate Prisoners. On an unnamed prison island off an unnamed European country, the Governor is plotting first to seize complete power in his own country, then to reach out for the world. His natural advantages in addition to his ruthless cult of power are exceptional: charming good looks, a handsome figure, an ingratiating personality, a lucid and imaginative intelligence. But the Governor sees far beyond mere political dominion. He intends to be venerated as a god; he is training prisoners to be his disciples.

Already they prostrate themselves before him in worship. To symbolize his oneness with his bemused subjects, he makes a crippled old woman prisoner his official consort. To cut off his link with the past, he kills his own father, one of his political prisoners. In what Author Warner intends as appropriate irony, a prison cast is rehearsing for a performance of King Lear as the novel's climax approaches ; the end of the play is to be the signal for the Governor's Putsch.

The leading characters are Mr. Goat, a young lecturer who is part of a cultural mission to the country, a symbol of pleasant, irresolute liberalism, and Maria, the Governor's own beautiful, amoral wife, who has fallen in love with Goat. On a yacht off the island, from which the stage can be seen, the Minister for Public Instruction, the Governor's political rival, is also waiting for the play to be over. When Mr. Goat, as Lear, comes on bearing Maria as the dead Cordelia, it is obvious that Maria is indeed dead; the Governor has killed her. At the Minister's signal, his crew fire a rocket broadside which kills the Governor, Mr. Goat,and almost everyone on the island.

Armor of Love. Author Warner's little allegory is generally clear enough. The Governor, so sure that the "masses" want someone to worship and not to be told "that it is their duty to think," evilly overreaches himself. But poky liberalism gets caught in the middle, as usual, and goes down, leaving the opportunist Minister for Public Instruction in doubtful control as civil war begins. Only the Governor's passively Christlike brother, a concentration-camp veteran, and his simple peasant wife are left free to face the evil with an armament of unselfish love.

Author Warner once ended an essay called The Cult of Power with these words: "The only reply to the cult of individual or racial power and violence is the actual practice of general justice, mercy, brotherhood and understanding." The trouble with Men of Stones as a fictional elaboration of this credo is that it reaches the intelligence without ever finding the way to the heart.

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