SEAGULLS IN MY SOUP

Companion volume to Jones's Saga of a Wayward Sailor (1979) and not a continuation of this season's To Venture Further (p. 1062). Saga was a song of love for women of the sea, while this self- styled work of ``fictionalized fact''—written in 1979 and displaying the author at his verbal richest—is a paean to the misfits who found refuge in Jones's company. We meet Jones in a downpour, aboard his ketch Cresswell, with his 170-pound British mate, Cecilia (``Sissie'') St. John—the Bishop of Southchester's sister—and his three-legged, one-eyed dog, Nelson. When St. John falls into the noisome harbor while helping a catamaran tie up, Jones turns ``to see poor Sissie's yellow oilskin jacket just below the oily, slimy surface, rising to float, flailing, in the muck- bestrewn, turd-flotilla'd, dog-corpse-littered waters of Ibiza Harbor.'' And so it goes, with Jones and St. John under dirty weather of gold-lined clouds. Their first big adventure is being hired to deliver a fancy yacht from Algiers to Marseilles. Once aboard, Jones finds that the owner is apparently an anti-Algerian terrorist and that his steel-hulled yacht must sail without papers, in the dead of night. They leave in a hail of bullets, chased by an Algerian gunboat. Eventually, Jones locks the owner below deck and gets away in a launch while the gunboat captures the terrorist. Enter St. John's loud-chortling brother, Bishop Willie, and millionaire ``art collector'' Elmyr Dore-Boutin, who shows Jones his huge cache of original Picassos, Dalis, Dufys and Renoirs- -though at book's end Jones visits Dore-Boutin in his tastefully appointed Ibizan jail cell and drinks his champagne: Dore-Boutin is actually the world's greatest forger. Good dialogue and great Jonesian prose, so dense you can walk on it and watch your tracks fill up with sea water.