BOOK REVIEW : Marionettes in an Aussie Morality Play : TAKING SHELTER <i> by Jessica Anderson</i> Viking $17.95, 232 pages

The recipient of Australia’s two major literary awards for fiction, Jessica Anderson concerns herself in “Taking Shelter” with the somewhat tardy impact of AIDS on the previously carefree morality of her country’s younger generation. So far, that impact seems to have been largely intellectual--a troubling possibility rather than a frightful reality. References to the disease have a curiously remote and theoretical quality, almost as if the allusions were inserted into the novel as an afterthought to an otherwise bland story.

Beth Jeams is a wispy young woman of 20, engaged to the sophisticated and ambitious Miles Ligard. After an intense courtship, Beth and Miles become lovers, but now Miles has inexplicably decided that they should remain chaste until their marriage.

There have been unsettling rumors about Miles’ sexual preferences, and dark hints that he may be planning to marry Beth only because of his political ambitions. Beth summons her entire stock of courage and asks Miles’ elderly cousin Julia McCracken if there is any truth to the gossip.

Julia, who has strongly favored the marriage out of deep affection for Miles, is forced to confront the morality of her position, which she does in a series of dreams, sequences that bring the pace of the novel virtually to a halt.

When Beth asks Miles flat out if he is a homosexual, he says, “At this time of my life it is a preference, which doesn’t mean that it will remain one. It’s known to quite a number of discreet and decent people, including my parents, who have always been simply splendid about it. As I took it for granted you would be too, Beth.”

Beth, however, is not quite able to be simply splendid about spending her life as the public cover for her fiance’s private life, and in short order, she abandons Miles. Almost at once, she meets and falls in love with Marcus Pirie, whose sexual preference is unambiguous, though he had been the lover of Beth’s promiscuous cousin Kyrie in the uninhibited ‘70s, when Sydney was apparently the sexual hub of the Antipodes. The subject of AIDS arises again when Beth and Marcus are tested for the virus. Before the results are in, Beth learns that she’s pregnant.

Long discussions, eerily reminiscent of American soap-opera summaries, ensue. Will Marcus marry Beth and settle down into faithful domesticity? Can they be absolutely sure that Beth hasn’t become infected with AIDS via Miles?

These matters are still unsettled when Marcus’ mother, Nita, arrives for an extended stay in the newly established love nest. Representing the sexual values of the older generation, Nita is in flight from her philandering husband, who has not only appropriated her interest in their jointly owned restaurant, but also betrayed her with a teen-age employee.

Happily, the ever-present Juliet McCracken comes to the rescue by arranging for the financially embarrassed Nita to work as housekeeper for Juliet’s aunt. Now that Beth has found true love with Marcus, Julia does everything she can to ensure the permanence of the match, thereby atoning for her previous efforts on behalf of Miles.

Though the novel is crowded with characters illustrating a wide variety of sexual manners and mores, 68-year-old Juliet McCracken is the most pivotal. Though married twice, she has decided that she’s “one of those rare creatures born without sexual feelings.” As such, she functions as a sort of moral puppeteer, pulling the strings that put these wooden figures through their paces.

Neither Beth, Miles, Marcus, Kyrie, Nita, nor the briefly met homosexual couple, ever manages to become more than marionettes illustrating the range of attitudes prevailing in Australia in the late ‘8Os, attitudes not only observed from Juliet’s vast emotional distance but removed still further from the American reader by time, language and geography.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “A Border Station” by Shane Connaughton.