The Long March of the British Badger : THE COLD MOONS <i> by Aeron Clement (Delacorte Press: $16.95; 320 pp.) </i>

This book is based on a real incident: In the mid-’70s, badgers were almost exterminated in Britain as a result of a careless assumption that they were responsible for the spread of a dangerous bovine tuberculosis. “The Cold Moons” tells the story of a group of badgers who escape their fate at the hands of the Ministry of Agriculture by leaving their sett and fleeing. Bamber, the sole survivor of another sett, heroically struggles to the edge of the Cilgwyn territory and lives just long enough to deliver his message. The Cilgwyn badgers, not without disbelief and confusion, agree to leave the only home any of them have known, to look for “Elysia,” the perfect sett that Bamber in his dying trance sees for them. And so they depart--with the human exterminators, their dogs and helicopters, in hot pursuit.

But their journey takes months and is plagued by hazards fatal to badgers. Not only do they have to worry ceaselessly about the human enemy, but their leader is a lazy if good-natured fellow, and his “cadre” of administrators is catastrophically divided between the good guys and the bad guys. There is one very bad guy among the badgers, Kronos, whose treachery turns murderous. Badgers also die in landslides, by drowning, by pneumonia, by being run over by trains; and any weak or wounded badgers, left behind of necessity, are, no matter how well hidden, found and cruelly killed by the ministry’s exterminators. The title refers to the winter the badgers must survive, homeless in a strange country, fearful that the dream of Elysia is only a dream. But all ends well--for those who live that long.

The author obviously feels passionately about badgers, and about all the flora and fauna of the countryside; “Moons” contains a great deal of zealous description. This reviewer’s copy came with two pages of frenzied praise from the British press, and the information that the book shot to the top of the London Times’ best-seller list. But my chief amazement is that the book was published at all.

The earnestness of Clement’s purpose shines in every line he writes; but he can’t write. He writes so abominably that the book is at best dismaying and at worst incomprehensible. It is rife with lines such as: “His heart warmed at her quiet courage and he knew that her ways would always be ways of pleasantness, and her heart would always follow the path of peace.” Not only is this a clunker (or series of clunkers) but it demolishes any possibility of this character’s surprising you. Character development in a novel (this quote comes early on) is usually accounted a virtue. Then there are lines that go beyond cliche to meaningless: “Whilst there was stock such as (two of the young badgers), the future of the Cilgwyn hierarchy was assured, these nutshells would truly become hearts of oak, each minaret a colossus amongst towers.” There’s even (gasp) poetry, stuff such as: “Bamber, the unknown, stranger from a distant sett/ Saved them with warning before his death he met.”

At the outset, Clement made a very odd decision: No dialogue, so everything in the book is laboriously explained at one remove. The badgers talk to each other--they weep, laugh, blush: “He was glad that he had such a profuse face covering, as he was sure he would have looked like a solitary poppy in a large green field” (badgers are naturally green?). They also “put their arms around each other’s shoulders” and have “joining of paws” when boar and sow mate. Kronos is also described as having “failed to hide his cloven foot,” an interesting image. So it cannot be that Clement meant to keep them the sort of badgers to be found in nonfiction books of natural history, and his decision therefore is incomprehensible.

Many British readers have already voted with their pocketbooks, but even if badger extermination units had been a terrible American mistake I couldn’t like this book. The best I can say for it is that after reading it I still like badgers.