THE TWO DEATHS OF CHRISTOPHER MARTIN (208 pp.)William GoldingHarcourt, Brace ($3.75).
William Golding, English novelist, writes like a French existentialist who has wandered into the Manhattan offices of True magazine. The French practitioners of the art of "the extreme situation" lean to plagues (Albert Camus) or politics and perversion (Jean-Paul Sartre). A Cornishman and sometime naval officer. Author Golding of course sends his existential hero to sea. Aboard a British destroyer in mid-Atlantic, Christopher Martin had just given the order "Hard a-starboard'' ("the right bloody order," too, he later reflects) when a...