A LISTENER'S GUIDE.

Human Voices

Penelope Fitzgerald

Houghton Mifflin Company, $12, 160 pp.

The trouble with memory "is that it develops its own defenses, against truth telling and in consequence against history"-so writes the eighty- three-year-old Penelope Fitzgerald, an adult witness to the Battle of Britain, in reviewing a recent book on London during the Blitz. Fitzgerald faced these problems, truth telling and memory's defenses, as a novelist in Human Voices, published almost twenty years ago in Britain and issued in the United States this spring for the first time. The novel, set in the BBC's Broadcasting House, attempts to record the truth of human voices against the lies of war, those "consolations" by which government radio hides or distorts what is happening. In the process, the book cannot but also raise the paradoxical relationship between fact and fiction: how can fiction be true? So heavy a philosophic weight might seem too much for so brief a work to bear, but its extraordinary style turns the tension in the paradox into a genuine aesthetic pleasure-even if the paradox itself goes unresolved.

But first, who is Penelope Fitzgerald and why is her twenty-year-old novel being reprinted? Much honored in Britain (Booker Prize winner in 1979, and shortlisted three times), Fitzgerald received acclaim here only recently for The Blue Flower, a historical novel on the life of Novalis, the German Romantic poet. She took a first-class degree in English from Oxford, married in 1941, and published her first work of fiction (still unavailable in the United States) when she was sixty- one. Before turning to novels she had written biographies of the painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones and of her illustrious uncles, the brothers Knox, including the Scripture scholar and Catholic convert, Ronald. Her father was, for a time, editor of Punch. In raising her three children, she resided in England and abroad, in circumstances sufficiently unusual to give her subjects for her work.

Fitzgerald is an uncanny, if understated, stylist. Her style is so distinctive that the novels give pleasure by making us ask how she achieves her effects. Those works of hers set outside England or beyond the immediate past (late eighteenth-century Germany, prerevolutionary Moscow, postwar Italy, Cambridge ca. 1912) abound with a detail, domestic and social, that makes fiction read like fact. Commonweal readers might particularly enjoy the sections of Innocence (1986) that take a wry look at Vatican politics through the aspirations of one Monsignor Gondi.

"I try to get the movement and counter-movement of the novel and its background to go together," Fitzgerald writes. "Human Voices was set in Broadcasting House in the old days of wartime radio, and the narration as far as possible is through voices and music." Memory and its defenses, truth telling, the honest sound of the human voice-these dilemmas and textures circulate thematically through the book, which is a love story, an ironically detailed recollection of Fitzgerald's own time at the BBC, a quirky and puzzling study of characters who are somehow beyond our comprehension and all the more human for this. It is also a tribute to Broadcasting House, which is conceived metaphorically as a kind of great ocean liner navigating the turbulent seas of war in the early forties. (Edward R. Murrow, in the form of the character Mac McVitie, rushes on and off as the bombs fall.)

Episodic is not the right term for Fitzgerald's style, nor is collage a correct way to describe the accumulation of scenes and bits of dialogue that characterize the work. Perhaps her own ocean liner metaphor is apt: the plot steams along taking characters to their ends; the occasional shock of emotional waves reminds us that we are underway. The novelist moves from deck to deck, cabin to cabin, recording, commenting sparingly, and letting the enigmatic quality of the dialogue provide the truth telling.

"Annie! If the summer had not been fine, there might have been no blackberries."

"Of course there mightn't," said Annie. "You're just making worries for yourself, Mr. Waterlow. There isn't anything at all that mightn't be otherwise. After all, I mightn't . . . what I mean is, how can they find anything else to broadcast that's got to be true, and couldn't be anything else?"

As this quotation suggests, Annie, the heroine of the love story, has an impenetrable resourcefulness; she shows as much faith in the workings of the BBC as she does courage in her own apparently fruitless devotion to her boss, Sam Brooks. We are not given much more sense of what motivates her-or for that matter what happens after her confession of her love to Sam, the RPD. (The BBC's notorious alphabet abbreviation is another aspect of the novel's truthfulness; it takes a few rereadings of the first twenty pages to distinguish the RPD [Recorded Program Director], from the DPP [Director of Program Planning], from the RPAs [Recorded Program Assistants] at BH [Broadcasting House].) There is interior monologue or approximate omniscient narration, but the effect of the style is one of distance rather than intimacy. We have dotty inconsequentiality, hilarity shared but somehow private, a point of view which is skewed to the eccentric, and a style which has the abruptness of bombs exploding and changing the contour of a neighborhood-but the noise and the explosions have happened the night before. We were not there and witness the aftereffects in the riddling dialogue and the abrupt changes of scene.

On occasion, the novelist as captain, does let us know what is happening:

"As an institution they could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle at Delphi...they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost....And every one who worked there, bitterly complaining...felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since."

Human Voices is, we must believe, the expression of that pride in the scattering of seeds of truth.

Edward T. Wheeler is the dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.