King Ludd

The final part of Sinclair's ( Gog ) Albion Triptych will be intelligible only to readers familiar with England's history and mythology, and diverting to only a handful of these. George ``Gog'' Griffin, a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, is polishing his thesis in praise of the Luddites and studying Druidic runes. When he is sent down from Oxford for his ``New Modest Proposal'' (suggesting England eat its unemployed workers), he goes on a journey along a Druid ``ley line,'' learning ``what went wrong in the land of Magog so that Gog and his brothers are not able to . . . earn their bread in plenty and peace.'' He has encounters (some in dreams) with Robin Hood and the Pardoner, among others. Then, through Colin Graveling, a mathematician who is developing a ``computing machine,'' Gog is asked to take some ``perforated cards'' into Europe in 1937, and the war finds Gog at Bletchley, musing on similarities between runes and Enigma code. The tale closes years later with Gog's son, who blithely fuses the work's myth and computer strains by asserting that computer games ``are the myths of today--our Odyssey, our Beowulf.'' It makes one wonder: If that's all there is to myth, why write a trilogy on it? (May)