BOOK REVIEW : Distortions Undercut Moral Tale : LIES OF THE NIGHT<i> by Gesualdo Bufalino translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh</i> Atheneum $18.95, 163 pages

“Lies of the Night” is elegantly shaped and maneuvered: a duel of wits for lethal stakes between a 19th-Century Italian prison commandant and four political prisoners awaiting execution. Despite its elegance, it is disappointing--as if expert swordsmen had been furnished with wooden swords.

The prisoners--a nobleman, a poet, a soldier and a student--belong to one of the revolutionary lodges fighting for an independent and unified Italy. The authorities, serving the Bourbon King, have immured them in a stony island fortress (much resembling Byron’s castle of Chillon) and condemned them to death.

The prison governor, a bitter old warrior with a keen philosophical mind and a harsh though subtle belief in established authority, goes to the four on the eve of their guillotining and makes them a cruelly ensnaring offer.

The government is desperately seeking the identity of their leader; it is known only that he goes by the title “God the Father” and that he is highly placed at court.

Accordingly, the four are given an ingenious choice. They will spend the night together, unshackled and in a comfortable chamber. Each will receive a pen and a sheet of paper. By dawn, each must write on the paper and place it in a locked box.

If any of the four writes the leader’s name, all four will go free. If all four write an “X” as sign of refusal, all will die.

It is a moral and philosophical trap. Because all four must write, a betrayer will preserve his secret and have only his own conscience to answer to. Thus, as the governor foresees, the long night will be a process of relentless psychological erosion.

Each of the four will have to weigh his own risk-free survival against loyalty to a leader who, no doubt, will be caught anyway. And even loyalty may not bring honor: Should any one of them give in anonymously, the hold-outs will share a public suspicion of poltroonery. And while wrestling with this hard choice, each will devoutly hope that one of the others will give in.

Clearly, as the governor foresees, there is nothing so demoralizing as to spend a night praying that your companions will behave worse than you do.

So far, so good. The setting and the dilemma have been sharply sketched. The prisoners are briefly but satisfyingly portrayed: the upright baron, the wavering and perpetually lovesick student, the hard-bitten militant soldier and the sardonic poet who languidly regrets that dawn is the time for executions. Dawns are too sudden; sunsets, the time of farewell, would be more pleasing.

As it is, “We shall consider ourselves the victims of an intolerable eviction.”

The governor, the central character, is depicted more fully. Dying and in intolerable pain from bone cancer, he clings to his philosophy of duty. To serve even a corrupt king is to serve the image of Divine Order he maintains. And however brave and noble the revolutionaries may be, they are inevitably on the side of Lucifer, the Divine Opponent.

The four are placed in the chamber along with a fifth man, heavily bandaged, who identifies himself as a notorious bandit also facing execution. He suggests that to pass the time, and perhaps to clear their minds, each of the four should tell of some crowning and some memorable moment in his life.

We anticipate four tales that will enrich and precipitate the puzzle. Unfortunately, these stories, which are the book’s centerpiece, are rickety and offhand.

The baron tells of being overshadowed by his twin brother until the latter dies in a duel. The soldier tells of his lifelong search for, and revenge upon, the man who seduced and abandoned his mother--his father, in other words. The poet tells of his involvement with a widow and of a bandit who overpowers him and ravishes her. Only the student’s tale of his love for a married woman who eventually rewards him for his revolutionary ardor has any real charm.

As it turns out, the stories are all distortions aimed at making their tellers look better. By the time we discover this--and it gives an intriguing twist to the puzzle--it is the end of the book.

But there are a number of other, even better, twists that cannot be revealed. All of these make a terrific ending, in fact, and live up in every way to the promise of the beginning. It is only the middle that is savorless, but the middle is the main course.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “The Choiring of Trees” by Donald Harington (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).