THE THIRD EYE

The Gottedammerung of the South African writer's Wagnerian comic trilogy, in which his archetypal behemoths wriggle out in the open to their death agonies. Again the hero of ""might and reason,"" of sandbag biceps and cerebellum, police detective Demosthenes de Goede (regaining his speech after his pursuit of primitive man in the last novel) tracks down his opposite number. De Goede's heroic counterpart, by some odd process of evolutionary bifurcation, is Boris Gudenov. Boris, himself a ""hero in an unheroic age,"" is a wizard entrepreneur, founder of the ""shopping center"" and from him all secular blessings flow. Booted on by his superior, de Goede searches here and there for the intangible Boris--through the cacophonous claptrap of a contemporary neon-plastic world, presided over by the living-death image of Bee-Bee-Doo, a sex-symbol product of Gudenov's enterprise. At the close de Goede-Gudenov deliver mutual death thrusts. In spite of the confusion, turgid with import, Leroux's lively comic invention scores the banality of soma-satiated new worlds. Last in a woolly but wildly fanciful ring of myth and metaphysics.