BOOK REVIEW : The Life of a Mighty Barrister’s Underling : THIS IS THE LIFE, <i> by Joseph O’Neill</i> ; Farrar Straus & Giroux; $18.95, 214 pages

Michael Donovan is golden: a top British barrister with a formidable courtroom manner, an expert who jets around the world for fat fees, a renowned professor of international law at Cambridge University.

James Jones is tin plate: a solicitor in a grubby London law mill with a gigantic list of tiny clients, such as the man who trips on a paving stone and sues the authorities over his painful toe and scuffed shoes.

There is a vast gulf between the two. Yet in this seriocomic--mostly comic--novel, Donovan and Jones are linked by an inchworm of history, and a tapeworm of obsession.

It is Jones’ obsession. Part clown, part punching bag, part Bartleby--if you can imagine the obdurate Bartleby telling his own story--Jones puts aside his papers, draws a profound literary breath, and clears his throat.

It will not be a simple story, he warns, and he is no good at storytelling. People go glazed when he tries. “Although I am an adept chronologist, I am not a natural recounter,” he explains. But he plucks up courage and a comparison. In the Underground, he had stood unpleasantly close to a hippie with hair so greasily caked that “it was impossible to tell which hair was which or where it came from or led to.” He continues with a flourish: “What I am aiming to do is run a comb through the matted locks of my memory.”

Jones thinks of Donovan as people have thought about God, though far more frequently. With a mixture, that is, of adoration and grievance.

His admiration for Donovan’s writings on international law spurred him to achieve a brilliant law school record. On the strength of this, he won an apprentice position in Donovan’s prestigious law chambers, and ended by working for the great man himself. He had every expectation of winning a barrister’s place in the firm, or failing that, in some other law chambers. But when the time came for selection, Donovan was abroad and had neglected to leave a recommendation. Worse, he had neglected to instruct Jones to apply elsewhere. In short, he had utterly failed in his duty, under English practice, to take the required interest in his subordinate’s career.

Hence, Jones’ lowly position. And yet, he harbored no particular resentment. God has mysterious ways; no doubt the great man was too busy. And too preoccupied to remember him when Jones plucks up courage to speak to him at a reception.

Accordingly, Jones is stunned and delighted when Donovan summons him sometime later to handle his wife’s divorce action. Jones puts on his best suit; he has visions of long, leisurely consultations, perhaps with a glass or two of port, where he will be able to offer sage guidance to his illustrious client.

As it turns out, Donovan knows precisely what he wants; to deflect the divorce by stonewalling. Jones is simply an instrument, used to carry out a very few instructions and, mostly, to receive none. Under some circumstances--the Mafia’s, for example--a lawyer kept in the dark can be the most effective kind, particularly if obstruction is the purpose.

“This Is the Life” takes poor Jones through a punishing round of complications; made more complicated by the fact that he cannot figure out what Donovan is up to. Periodically, he receives some mark of regard, some intangible bolstering, and his spirits duly soar. Invariably, each is followed by a new and worse humiliation.

He knows he is being abused--”like one of those Turkish beach turtles that mistake the glow of cafeterias for the luminous sea,”--but, until the end, he keeps coming back for more.

Joseph O’Neill, a young English barrister and first-time novelist, gets bogged down in some of his plot’s complications. He introduces characters--Jones’ discouraged girlfriend, Donovan’s manic father--who chug about to little effect. A scene in which Jones gets into Donovan’s house and snoops around is wordy and flat.

O’Neill can write wittily. A sleek young barrister has “his part cut purposefully through his hair, clean as a road in a cornfield, as though it led to some significant destination.” He can overwrite or misfire; using such phrases as “booming air” and “muscular water,” and elaborating one single image for several paragraphs.

Donovan, at the end, is efficiently if not remarkably unshod; and reveals clay-covered feet. But the heart of the book, and its lovely achievement, is Jones’ extravagant and comical obsession; one that terminates on a satisfyingly sour note.

With an exuberance that makes up for the roughness, O’Neill gives us one more cutting view of the English class system. Donovan’s cruelty is the more cruel for being unconscious. He never sees Jones, he never thinks of him, he never remembers him. It is domination by obliviousness; and it has worked for a few hundred years, although, as suggested by Jones’ grimmer-but-wiser emergence at the end, it has grown pretty frayed.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Lost Ones” by Frederick Tristan (William Morrow).