BOOK REVIEW : Satirical Twist on Loss-of-Innocence Tale : A BOTTLE IN THE SMOKE <i> by A.N. Wilson</i> : Viking: $18.95, 290 pages

Opening with the jaded voice of an aging English writer revisiting his favorite rooms in the Tate Gallery, “A Bottle in the Smoke” immediately whisks us back to the 1950s, when narrator Julian Ramsay has just arrived in London.

Eager, callow and confident of an eventual welcome in the literary Establishment, he impulsively left the security of a job at a shirt company for the precarious existence of an unpublished novelist.

A friend already at work in publishing steers him to lodgings with an odd couple of semi-employed actors--Fenella and Rikko, who not only provide him with a convenient address but also with material for the most diverting passages in this purported memoir.

Much of the additional color and incidents come from Ramsay’s part-time stint as barman in a run-down pub managed by a foul-mouthed tough who bears an eerie resemblance to T.S. Eliot.

Although the title suggests the pub’s atmosphere and its stock-in-trade, “A Bottle in the Smoke” is actually a Biblical reference.

“It wouldn’t have been a glass bottle,” explains Julian’s Uncle Roy, a vicar emeritus. “You’ve got to think of yourself shriveling up like an old leather pouch too near the fire.” Something of the sort may eventually happen to the narrator in the third and last volume of this trilogy, but here, in the second book, Julian is blooming in the heady air of his chosen world.

Orphaned in early childhood, Julian was brought up in the country vicarage by Uncle Roy, regaled all his life by tales of the illustrious Lampitt family, relations of the vicar. Now in London, Julian is introduced to Anne, who turns out to be the niece of one of these same Lampitts, a coincidence that so delights Julian’s guardian that Uncle Roy forgives his nephew his defection to London.

After Julian and Anne marry, the tone of the novel deepens. The romantic dream of young love and la vie boheme is complicated and soured by the machinations of Raphael Hunter, an ambitious and unscrupulous young journalist who is writing a biography of Anne’s eccentric uncle, Sargie Lampitt. His book will expose family secrets never openly acknowledged by the fond vicar or by other accomplished and prominent members of the Lampitt clan.

Trusting and naive, Julian is only too glad to allow Hunter to act as his literary agent and mentor. When his first novel is accepted for publication, Julian never tumbles to the fact that Hunter’s favors must be paid for in kind. Hunter is not interested in Julian’s artistic future, but in gaining access to another of Lampitt’s private diaries, journals that will thoroughly demolish the cherished Lampitt legend and tarnish several current reputations.

What might otherwise be a routine loss-of-innocence story is transformed by these convolutions into a satiric and often comic exploration of the underside of London’s literary world. Even as they lie, betray and exploit one another for personal advantage, A.N. Wilson’s characters remain poised and witty, wonderful company even--and especially--at their worst.

They’re so amusingly wicked that we’re almost sorry when Julian has an illuminating experience while walking through Bloomsbury Square. There, in an apercu that hints at a new direction for Volume III, he realizes: “I did not really want to be an actor; I did not want to be married; I no longer cared about this book, though I felt the beginnings of a deeper desire to write fully and honestly, not with the brittle surface of my mind, and not humorously or cruelly.”

Happily, this wholesome and admirable vow is already receding as he emerges from the square on his way to a party, wondering “which, or how many Sitwells would be standing at the top of the stairs when I went in”--a hint that the clever, detached narrator will still be around for the next book, at least at the beginning.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Mexican Bolero” by Angeles Mastretta (Viking).