Sculpted in Whipped Cream : THAT TIME IN MALOMBA<i> By James Hamilton-Paterson (Soho Press: $18.95; 180 pp.; 0-939149-42-7)</i>

Asked why the English have produced no great composers, Paul Tortelier, the much-loved French cellist and wise observer of the world scene, offered the view that “As long as you have twin beds and teatime, you won’t have great composers.” Denied their share of brooding musical romantics, the English have sought compensation elsewhere. One result has been their unrivaled mastery of light fiction, particularly the short novel.

As a genre, the novella is exquisite in its demands on the writer. To the task of assessing human character, one must bring almost waspish powers of perception and a gift for immaculate phrasing. The marriage of wit and atmosphere essential to the entertaining novella demands the delicate control of a sculptor of whipped cream. Lightness is all.

Pace Tortelier, the enabling English quality is coziness. As nothing else, teatime and twin beds conspire toward that condition. It is this coziness, a tempered domesticity, that is the effective legacy of the 18th-Century comedy of manners and of Jane Austen to the contemporary masters of English light fiction.

In “That Time in Malomba,” James Hamilton-Paterson exploits the virtues of this tradition. His novel is a gentle satire of innocence abroad, of an English hippie still slouching toward enlightenment in guru-ridden Asia two decades after the ‘60s vanished in a puff of pot.

The decades have left their mark on Tessa Hemony. She has shed a husband (he abandoned her and the commune for a career in petrochemicals) but acquired two street-smart children--the beautiful Zoe, on the rebound from a romantic fling in Bel-Air, and Jason, cynical adventurer in search of a good time. Neither child is enamored of Tessa’s eternal quest for enlightenment and a cure for her backache, but they dutifully save their native mother from being gypped and conned in one Eastern mecca after another.

It is her quest for “psychic surgery” that has brought the Hemonys to Malomba, city of 39 temples and the psychic surgeon. There the family is promptly hijacked by Laki, the mischievous bellboy at the Hotel Nirvana, a crumbling tourist trap managed by the unforgiving Mr. Muffy.

The hotel and surrounding alien culture (these innocents speak no Asian tongue) provide the essential enclosure, like the mansion in a classic mystery, where the contest of character, closely observed, can unfold. The result is cross-cultural farce. Laki beds each Hemony in turn; they respond by rewarding him with gifts that bring his bell-boy career to a bruised conclusion. Something for everyone.

The plot is thin, but the characterization is stronger, the dialogue often witty, and the atmosphere painted in luxuriant tones. This is how the story begins:

“Walking beneath the vine, Laki would leave his hutch on the roof and go out in the turquoise dawn. Standing among litter . . . he could look over town to the surrounding hills of coconut and bamboo whose western slopes slept darkly even as their sunward faces blazed. In the middle ground is a profusion of temples of one sort or another, fierce canonical pressures beneath Malomba’s surface having caused religious buildings to bubble and mould themselves freakishly like cooling glassware. From them arose competing sounds of clergy performing their various rites to celebrate daybreak. The mosque’s glass pencil had already spoken; the weed-tufted skull of the procathedral still dozed. A bronze trumpet blew over one quarter and from another came the distant thrashing of gongs.”

Two volumes of published poetry stand behind this prose, and it shows. There is also gentle humor.

When Tominy Bundash, the Hemonys’ pedantic tour guide, is caught patronizing one of the local cults, the avenging high priest notes: “It’s one of the inherent ironies of mass tourism which has Muslims explaining Spodism to Christians, to say nothing of philistines lecturing the indifferent about masterpieces of art and architecture. But I would not dignify this irony with the name of entropy. No; I would simply call it Bundashism and leave it at that.” Thanks to Hamilton-Paterson, “Bundashism” may enter the language.

Laki, having escaped the parochial simplicities of his childhood, ponders why he can never go home again: Life there was “not so much a question of knowing who was marrying whom, whose boat had been repossessed by the rural bank for defaulting on a loan, who had been caught giving short measure. It was more a matter of habitual mornings with catapults, nightly fishing, daily choppings of firewood; the constant renewing of bonds, the shared uneventfulness.”

It is this intelligence applied to the human condition, and his sensuous and apparently effortless command of words, that has saved the author from literary oblivion, at least in the American market.

His first novel, “Playing With Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island,” sold only 150 copies in hardcover here. But America is a society where critics both break and make literary reputations. In this case, the saving angel was William H. Gass, who wrote a rapturous review in the New York Times.

True, Hamilton-Paterson has marvelous gifts for words and the quiet perusal of human foibles. But “That Time in Malomba” also bears the scars of the failings of its very Englishness, of its enclosed gardenlike coziness. Against these shortfalls--let us call them “Atlantic”--we may need to set the claims of a Californian or Pacific sensibility.

The gaptoothed pidgin English with which Hamilton-Paterson equips almost every Asian character smacks of stereotype. The text is furthermore littered with words of an imaginary local dialect. This provides an exotic flavor, but it also suggests a certain unearned knowingness.

This is Asia observed, not understood. Far too often the comic effect is achieved by playing on an ignorance of Asian realities that is untrue of a great many Californian readers. Things of course may be different in New York and London.

Granted, Laki is a charming invention, but he is a shadow when compared to Kipling’s Kim. To mention Kipling is of course to invoke the full force of the contentious wrangle over the literature of imperialism. Nevertheless, he showed the British how to annex whole empires for the imagination.

In this sense, the author has been unfaithful to both the traditions he is heir to. First, there is Jane Austen. Writing at the time of great wars and revolutions, she lets nothing intrude on her witty scrutiny of character at teatime. On home ground, her grasp of social nuance is total.

In place of such mastery, Hamilton-Paterson offers the reader an imaginary war to nibble at the edges of an imaginary Oriental society speaking an imaginary dialect, in a place he calls Asia. Kipling, who fathered the anti-cozy imperial tradition in English fiction, would not have been impressed. Nor should we be. In their very different ways, Austen and Kipling showed that knowledge is no obstacle to invention.

In this sense, “That Time in Malomba” is a form of literary Orientalism, a beautifully written fantasy about the East for people who will never go there. It is in the tradition of European chinoiserie. Such are Hamilton-Paterson’s formidable talents that East Coast critics would make him the genius of their shore. Theirs; but not ours.