THE BAMBOO BED by William Eastlake. 350 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.50.
William (Castle Keep) Eastlake has visited Southeast Asia twice since 1966, but no one could be less of a war-correspondent novelist. In The Bamboo Bed, he approaches the struggle in Viet Nam not as a three-dimensional event but as the frighteningly abstract piece of surrealism that we all share on the evening news. Black comedy, myth, shaggy parables of the top secrets of the human heart—these are the literary forms war takes for Eastlake.
At the center of Eastlake's brilliantly grotesque fantasy swaggers Captain Clancy. Clancy wears a Roman helmet with...
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