Books: Anger Under the Snows

THE WILD SWEET WITCH (234 pp.)— Philip Woodruff—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

The cold mountain air of the upper Himalayas pervades this novel of north India, giving it a quality, like its setting, far removed from the luxuriant misery of the plains. It is a novel notable for a fair effort at balancing sympathies between

Indians and British. The scales tip, however; and no Indian will care for the novel's final implication that, by & large, three generations of British administrators were cool, active and kindly men faced with a buzzing of unstable—if lovable—children.

Novelist Woodruff, whose real name is Philip Mason, worked as a...