FOR SOMEONE who was looking forward to the next in a series of apocalyptic novels by Walker Percy, Lancelot is like a disappointing rendezvous with an old flame. It lacks the electricity of former days, the stunning moments of lucidity and passion. The one who once radicalized you and opened your eyes to new kinds of wrongness in the world now has grown conservative, even reactionary. The eyes that once held the greatest depth, the silences that bore such meaning hypnotize you and hold you for a moment, but then you wonder whether still waters run deep or stagnant.

Even with his humorous and noble style intact, Lancelot is Percy's bitterest novel, written not with the black humor of alienation but with the crotchety distemper of a curmudgeon. It does not add to Lancelot Edwarde Lamar's credibility as an existential visionary that he speaks from a private cell in a mental hospital, reflecting on his incineration of his adulterous wife and her lover on his family estate. There is a sense that Percy feels ambivalent towards a character who might be his spokesman and who might also be crazy.

Lancelot is a phenomenon comparable to Travis Bickel (Taxi Driver) as an ex-Southern gentleman. Like Travis Bickel, Lancelot takes the matter of moral response and retribution into his own hands. For them violence is the only way to take a moral stand or to make anyone pay attention.

But Percy sees the moral problem of the age not as active evil but as moral boredom, as acquiescence, as the South absorbed and homogenized into America. "There I was," Lancelot says, "forty-five years old and I didn't know whether there was evil in the world."

Tied in with the world's moral disintegration is the dissolution of the South and the Southern gentleman, a major theme in all Percy's novels. Consequently, the Southern lady has disappeared and part of Lancelot's reconstructed moral order assigns an inordinate meaning to sexual sin:

Look across the street. Do you see that girl's Volkswagen bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is there anything wrong with it?

Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love so is the greatest evil?.. Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.... So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.

When Lancelot discovers that he is not the father of his daughter Siobhan he decides his wife Margot must be destroyed by fire and brimstone, his New Orleans home Belle Isle as Sodom and Gomorrah.

Percy elevates the stuff of soap opera to a medieval morality tale. The parallels between Arthurian chivalry, Southern gentility and Christian militancy are in fact a single strand in Percy's fabric. He is a severely and sincerely Christian novelist who may speak from the fictional mouth of a potential madman to acknowledge the difference between a Cassandra and a crank.

Lancelot's sexual cosmology has a curious logic which he later applies to all history including his own. But it includes a view of women that harks back to the era of courtly love, "It is no longer possible to 'fall in love'," he says early on, "But in the future and with the New Woman it will be." His focus is too narrow: he conceives of the New Woman rather than a New Voice, or a New Person. About the position of women in his future utopia he sounds suspiciously like Stokely Carmichael:

Women? What about women? You heard me. A man, a youth, a boy will know which women are to be fucked and which to be honored and one will know who to fuck and who to honor.

Freedom? The New Woman will have perfect freedom. She will be free to be a lady or a whore.

Don't women have any say in this? Of course. And we will value them exactly as much as they value themselves. They won't like it much, you say? The hell with them. They won't have anything to say about it. Not only are they not strong enough. They don't care enough. Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods.

THE PROTOTYPE of the New Woman is Anna, Lancelot's next-cell neighbor, who was shocked into catatonia by brutal rape. Lancelot is able to uncoil her after six months in her reactionless fetal position by knocking in code on the wall, to which she finally responds. Stripping down communication to the most basic level is a favorite Percy theme. It is part of Lancelot's Romantic notion that Anna has transcended the violence that confronted her and thus is capable of becoming the New Woman.

Catastrophe pervades Percy's psychology. It takes an apocalyptic force to shake Lancelot out of a seven-year stupor in which his only pleasure in life was Raymond Chandler novels, and into a reevaluation of his quality of life (which moves him to such drastic action). Percy's characters often are alienated and then transformed by an experience which gives them a new perspective. He likes to describe this new ability to see the whole from a distance as a Martian perspective. Yet only after such an experience are Percy's characters capable of love, a principle solidified in his third novel, Love in the Ruins. This jolt is so essential to his conception of man in the modern world that he worries "Not what will happen if the Bomb should drop, but what if it should not drop?"