Sophisticated Sermon

THE GREATER TRUMPS (268 pp.)--Charles Williams--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3).

Poet T. S. Eliot once said that he could fearlessly spend a night in a haunted house if Novelist Charles Williams were there to keep him company. Williams' supernatural thrillers make most hauntedhouse yarns seem treacly by comparison. But they are also the legacy of an intellectual, firmly orthodox Christian who calmly discovered God where many men would be embarrassed to look for Him. The Greater Trumps is the fifth of Williams' seven novels to be published in the U.S. since his death in 1945.

In The Greater Trumps, as in the other four, good and evil, love and selfishness, salvation and damnation are as palpable and pervasive as the terrifying Christmas Day blizzard that forces his characters to cast up their spiritual accounts in an eerie English country house. All Williams needs to get things started is a rare deck of cards, the perfectly normal Coningsby family and a suitor for Nancy Coningsby who has gypsy connections. From there on, in deceptively simple prose, Williams keeps his story moving without a hitch on three levels: 1) a more-or-less conventional love story; 2) a psychological and poetic mystery which employs gypsy magic and visitations from out of this world; 3) a treatise on God as the source of love, and love as the tie that can bind all humanity together and humanity in turn to God. It is typical of Williams that those of his characters who selfishly try to deny God are not cast out but saved.

The Greater Trumps is not so good as War in Heaven (TIME, Oct. 10). As a novel it is too slight and its people are too obviously puppets; as a thriller it makes too many demands on credulity. But as a vehicle for Charles Williams' gentle the ology, it is both sophisticated and per suasive. The idea of God as love has had few abler champions in or out of fiction.

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