another, especially how weak people need a strong person (Bill Pleasance) to give them the needed life force to get through their purposeless days and nights. In turn, paradoxically, Pleasance draws his strength from this very situation of having weak people dependent upon him-upon his money and his force of will.

Yet will-power is not enough for him to win the love of the only person he really cares about in this world other than himself his adopted son Ben. Understand, this is not a physical passion. There may be an underlying homosexual element here, but I don't think the author intended one.

When Josephine runs off with Max to live in London, presumably on Pleasance's bounty, still, young Ben, at the school where our narrator, Beamish, teaches, is persuaded by a friend, Challenor, to write to his father that he prefers to live with his mother when not at school. If one could persuade one's self that Bill Pleasance has a heart, one would believe that this childishly cruel letter had broken it. The trouble with the book is that it is so restrained and the figures in it drawn so palely that the terrible hurt of this episode does not reach the reader except intellectually, one does not feel it and weep over it.

And the gratuitous death in an auto crash of young Ben and his "bad" friend Challenor at the end of the book is too gross a contrivance to serve the ironic purpose intended by the author. For Ben had realized, just before his death, that he had chosen wrongly. Aware of the strength of his stepfather's love and of the grim fact that his mother did not love him at all, he had reversed the decision in his letter to Pleasance. But he never got a chance to tell Pleasance so. Only Beamish knew. And in the end when, following the accident, Beamish tries to reassure Pleasance that the love he

lavished on his step-son was returned, the bereaved and broken stepfather cannot believe him.

The characters in the book are pretty well-realized. But their actions are forced. There is a little episode that takes place at the school between young Ben and his friend Challenor. But this, which at first blush seems to be the budding of a homosexual calamity turns out to be only a childish wrestling match-or does it? The author leaves us in doubt. That phrase might, in fact, be used to characterize the whole book. The author leaves us in doubt about too much.

ACE-HI Moving & Storage Co.

Bruce D. Ross, Owner

A Complete Personalized Service

at Minimum Rates

5154 Hollywood Blvd.

Los Angeles 27 Normandy 1-3183

Visit Our

-J. C.

Furniture Showrooms

at

127 S. Western Avenue Dunkirk 9-1204

27