pany surveillance, but actually fair and open-season game for all comers.

The day-to-day duties of the waiters and kitchen crew on board the Cyclamen are expertly handled. The relations of wingers with the passengers they serve and with the supervisory personnel are told with a fine ear and eye for class distinctions and human foibles, winning and otherwise. The atmosphere below decks of the great luxury ship as she wallows through the changing seas of this long, long voyage from one remote corner of the British Commonwealth to the other is vividly conveyed.

And so is Harry's affair with Princey, one of the bellboys. There is no overlaying of the relationship with phony remanticism or sentimentality. It is told with dignity and rueful sympathy for all the hazards and heartbreaks implicit in such an episode the long waits in the showers in the hope that the room will clear, the clandestine meetings in the small hours on the forecastle deck where the crew goes to sleep in equatorial weather, the carefully simulated indifference to each other when going about the daily grind, and finally a chance encounter in a stall in the head.

Isn't this the end, though? Harry thought grimly, holding him tightly and closing . . The absolute

his eyes. rock bottom? But for all the ring of truth in so much of the background sketching, in the minor characters, in the leading character's thoughts and emotions, the plot of Winger's Landfall is at best second-rate a sort of queer boy's Howard Pease adventure and the presence of a character named Bernard Norrie just about wrecks the book completely.

Norrie is so obviously a cardboard character, and his function is so obviously symbolic, and the conflict set up between him and Harry Shears so obviously contrived, one is embarrassed

to write about it. Supposedly, Norrie, a wine steward, about forty-five, has made looking after the moral welfare of the bellboys his special province. This in itself is acceptable enough. A certain stuffy type of auntie sometimes takes on this sort of role. But Lauder has overplayed the matter, attempting to make us swallow Bernard as founder of a new religion, a mish-mash of East and West, with headquarters in a sort of Shangri-La at Colombo, and a little chapel on board the Cyclamen, where the bellboys not only do Yoga exercises, but have extra-sensory experiences in trance states, yet! Lauder makes Harry Shears' sour cynicism about this convincing, but even that cannot save the contrivance.

There is heart and humanity in Winger's Landfall, and there is suspense. But the rounding off of the story is dismally unsuccessful. A new element in Harry's character is dragged in at the last moment and though scenically well-handled, the final episode of the book is not legitimate. It would appear that author Lauder has attempted at the last moment to make of Harry Shears a figure of evil. If so, he quite naturally fails because of the sympathetic role Shears has filled throughout the book. The attempt to elevate Bernard Norrie to the Christ image if that is what Lauder has meant is pretentious and out of keeping with the book's basically naturalistic tone.

The failure of this novel is especially distressing because one feels that there is so much worthwhile about it. The author has considerable talent. One looks forward to Stuart Lauder's next with real anticipation.

-James Colton

THE CENTURY GOD SLEPT, by David Chagall, Thomas Yoseloff, Pub., 1963, 255 pp. If The Century God Slept is not a "beatnik" book, and the publisher claims that it is not, then at least it is

27