The Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties

In this version of that venerable themethe ambitious provincial lad undertaking to conquer the worldKelvin Walker, son of a penurious grocer and afire with Nietzschean illusions about power and its uses, departs his native Scotland for London Town, the center of the universe, plotting to make it very big by starting at the . . . top. Backwater naivete and Scottish chutzpah somehow propel him to an envied position as a BBC interviewer, which allows him to rub shoulders with the cream of society. Life comes pouring in from all directions, not the least in the delicious form of Jill, through whose kindly ministrations he finds God. Eventually Kelvin topples from his eminence through a combination of overweening ambition, ultra-rightist fixed ideas and unbending North-country rigidity. Before then, foibles are detected and fools, knaves and imposters flogged. Farce of this kind should be hilarious if it is to be persuasive, yet that level of comedy is not attained by this bright, occasionally amusing and charming little novel, subtitled ""Fable of the Sixties.'' (August 29)