BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

SMITH & JONES, by Nicholas Monsarrat, Wm. Sloane Associates, New York, 1963, 182 pp., $3.50.

Here is a novel with a surprise ending — guaranteed to tease even the most accomplished follower of Agatha Christie. However, Smith & Jones is not a mystery story; it is a political commentary on a sinister problem of modern times: national security, and the liberties powerful governments are taking against their citizens in the name of security. Our own government, ostensibly to safeguard our inalienable rights, currently defends a policy of lying, wire-tapping, blackmailing, and intimidation this activity directed against its own people.

Coming in for more than their share of suspicion and scrutiny are homosexuals. Just the hint of this taint in a government employee or worker in defense contracts brings constant, intricate surveillance and questioning or immediate firing. Ivan Smith and Peter Jones, both in government service, are suspected of being homosexual, but before they can be dealt with they desert their country.

The two books following the Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defection from England in 1951 (Troubled Midnight by Rodney Garland and The Missing Macleans by Geoffrey Hoare) both stress and ridicule the homosexuality of Burgess and Maclean. Mr. Monsarrat on the other hand ridicules Intelligence men, secret po-

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lice, embassy officials ticularly the prototype of them all the Security Officer, watchdog of personal files who pitilessly, calculatingly tracks down his quarry without consideration for personal weight and ironically defeats his intended purpose. Unfortunately, the author is a story-teller at the surface level. The intelligence agencies turn out to be inept. They lack the complicated machinery for accomplishing anything; they have no visible means of gathering information. Mr. Monsarrat does give his sleuths stamina. But he either knows nothing about the employment of tape recorders, trap doors, keyholes and other devices that should enliven such a book, or he leaves them out of his story for other reasons. The result of this almost total lack of "inside information" deprives the book of suspense and seriously weakens what could be a stunning effect. It is a flaw in craftsmanship.

Mr. Monsarrat nearly makes up by being deliciously hard on his smallminded, mean-minded first-person Security man. He has no pity on this loathsome creature. Through him (he is known as "Drill-Pig") we see the destructive force of governments mad about power and prestige, ruled by "the smug, self-satisfied, narrowminded conformists . . . where everyone has to fit in." "Unless you stay in your appointed niche and behave like a good boy from cradle to grave, you might as well be dead," says defector