BOOKS

ADVICE AND CONSENT by Allen Drury, Doubleday, $5.95, 619 pp.

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, a fascinating novel that deals with Washington politics, is actually a novel within a novel.

For although the main plot deals with the Senate's decision to 'advise or consent' or reject a Presidential nomination and the ramifications, conflicts, triumphs, ambitions, frustrations and tragedies that ripple through the course of their debates, the human story of Senator Brigham Anderson's book forms the subplot and core, a novel in itself, of the book. The exploitation of the senator's homosexual past by political parties who pressure him, by using his integrity as a lever that inadvertently becomes a hand grenade, merely ties subplot to plot.

The treatment of this section is a masterpiece in its own right. With remarkable insight Mr. Drury has sketched the picture of a public figure and brilliant statesman, an intelligent homosexual who has deliberately repressed his deviation and come to terms with himself. With the subtlety of a Chinese line drawing a sort of word picture emerges of the poignant and tender love affair in the senator's youth during the war. The subsequent silent embittered conflict between the weakness and the strength of his character which, to quote the book, together bring him down, the painful holding together of a doomed marriage through a troubled child, the wife's desperate groping to reach him in his detachment, his terrifying vulnerability when the house of cards collapses are treted with meticulous delicacy and skill.

There is nothing coarse, vulgar or

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erotic-the word sex is never mentioned yet the almost, but not quite, complete repression of the homosexual tendency of Brigham Anderson is there, pulsing through the masterfully written pages.

There is no moralizing or discussion of homosexuality as such. Yet the moral and the commentary are palpable in the inuendo when tragedy strikes and subplot ties up with plot. The senators who are his intimate friends accept his weakness when faced with his integrity (to disclose exactly how would destroy the expertly conceived focal point of the tie-up), ability, self-respect, justice, decency, moral courage and honesty.

It is the triumph of these qualities over the man's sexual deviation that make Brigham Anderson the most complex and the most important literary character in today's fiction. It is the acknowledgement of this triumph that gives this section an almost Biblical stature.

To elaborate on the many points of the novel as a whole with fairnessthe absorbing study of backstage Washington; the sheer artistry of the verbal duels in the Senate debates with their points and counterpoints, feints, parries, thrusts; the razorsharp strategies; the finesse of the political manoeveres; the sparkling swordplay of the dialogues; the character sketches ranging from the fleshtinted leads, Bob Munson, Seab Cooley, Orrin Knox, the President, and, of course, Brigham Anderson, to the delicate caricatures and the cruel lampoons; the construction which rises in a multiple series of triangles in best Greek-dramatic-structure tradition to the diamond-point climaxrequires ony superlatives.

There are two near faults: Mr. Drury's tendency to chauvinism and the length of the book (619 pages).

Nevertheless, Advise and Consent has recently hit the 'best seller' list in