DOUBTFUL PARTNERS, by John Haylock. London: Arcadian, 1998, 188 pp., 10.99 British Pounds.

This is John Haylock's sixth novel. Like the others, it is a diverting essay on the English sense of class. His characters are members of the gentry in a world -- Asia -- where the pretensions of British birth and breeding cannot exist. These comic figures are undone by their new reality.

In Haylock's world, this reality usually takes the form of sex -- this urge puts these people through their paces. At first, they are offended by it. One of them suffers what she describes as "a provocative gesture," offered by a Japanese.

The provocative gesture occurs at the door of her flat. "He had taken off his pullover, undone his shirt buttons to the navel, half unzipped his trousers and put his fingers on his crotch. 'You no like?' he had said."

Though she answers no, not at all, another British older woman, given a similar opportunity with a similar young Japanese, succumbs at once. "Stinking of alcohol, he throws off his clothes and hurls himself on top of me...Lucky me! I wouldn't get a 26-year-old doing that in England."

Eventually all of these hapless English are gently liberated from their genteel ways. "Leonard put down his book, shut his eyes and thought of Yuichi. Why was it that the young Japanese kept invading his mind, even when reading Jane Austen?"

This new novel gently moves from England to Japan to Thailand and skillfully involves its mixed-race cast in all its possible permutations. Like figures in Restoration comedy or Edwardian farce, they lose their dignity, their position and their pretensions. But they are also rewarded for these trifling losses.

One woman complains: "He sniffs my body. He puts his nose to my cheek, my breasts, my stomach and sniffs." Her friend tells her that this is the Thai way of kissing. "I don't like it. It's as if he were testing to find out if I'd washed." No, no, says the friend, it's a sign of affection and anyway, "you must get used to it. Love in the East is different, like their conception of the truth."

It is the truth which these discomfited people eventually discover. The sense of class dissolves in sex and satire, and what they had taken for fact is revealed as fancy. None of Haylock's characters, once awakened, can again go back to sleep.

This theme is so peculiarly English that it has created an entire genre of novels, of which Haylock's are the latest examples. Though Austen and Thomas Love Peacock perhaps heralded it through their ironic observations of landed gentry, we are most familiar with it through the novels of Evelyn Waugh, of the Mitford sisters, and of Muriel Spark, the single writer whom Haylock in his sometimes outrageous forthrightness most resembles.

As Ian Buruma remarked in his Sunday Telegraph review of Haylock's memoir, "Eastern Exchange," what makes Haylock "so fascinating is his air of English gentility. He makes promiscuity sound almost genteel."

Like the characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the greatest of English class comedies, the well-bred lovers encounter another world, where breeding in this sense means nothing, but where breeding, in its other sense, means everything. A rustic becomes the equivalent of a courtier and Oberon -- an Asian, himself infatuated with a little Indian prince -- hands out the love potions.

This diverting, delightful sixth novel continues the strip show of English pretensions. I can think of no one else writing this lightly, this unpretentiously and this well of what is still perhaps a stark reality -- the English and their class system.

The book may be ordered directly from Arcadia Books Ltd., 15-16 Nassau Street, London W1N 7RE. tel/fax (44) 1-71-436-9898