Books: Power & No Glory

THE VOLCANOES ABOVE Us (256 pp.)—Norman Lewis—Pantheon ($3.75).

Latin America has long been a favorite setting for a certain kind of fiction—part adventure, part ideology—that year by year seems to grow more bitter, desperate and violent. Novelists as different as D. H. Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent),

Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory) and Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) have marched down that trail. What they have seen is less Latin America in the strict sense than a miniature reflection of world events—the Spanish Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, the struggle of Communist v. Catholic, the decline of imperial Britain and the rise...