Beyond the haunting title of Brigid Brophy's second novel lies a tale as strange and original as the one she told three years ago in "Hackenfeller's Ape." Like that small, remarkable book, "The King of a Rainy Country" is youthful, glittering, a little perverse; and it is written in the same immaculate prose.

The narrator, Susan, is a nineteen-year-old Londoner who takes a job as secretary to one Finkelheim (born Gilchrist), a dealer in publishers' remainders and pornography; and who in a manner of speaking shares a dingy flat with a youth named Neale. Susan and Neale are a pair of romantics, self-conscious, precious, intermittently exasperating; but they are, after all, very young, and Miss Brophy manages to make them touching as well.

What plot there is has to do with their search for a former schoolmate…. [The] book becomes for a time a kind of comic travelogue...