A ROOM ON THE ROUTE (327 pp.)Godfrey BlundenLippincoft ($3).
A Room on the Route is the best novel on Russia since Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, though Koestler's book is still much the better. Written by a 40-year-old Australian, A Room on the Route has many qualities of traditional Russian fiction, including some that Russian writers have not recently dared to indulge. No Russian could write so honestly, and so far no Western visitor to Russia during the war has drawn such good fiction from his experience. Blunden was in Moscow for 14 months in 1942-43 as a correspondent for the Sydney...