Books: Missing, and Never Found

LOOK SOUTH TO THE POLAR STAR (554 pp.)—Holger Cahill—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

The author of this novel about China visited China briefly years ago, and has never been back. Since then Minnesota-born Holger Cahill, 54, has headed the WPA Art Project, and written an able biography of U.S. soldier-of-fortune Frederick T. (“Chinese”) Ward. This long, rich novel is as full of indigestible mixtures and exotic surprises as the $1.35 “Chinese” dinner at any U.S. city’s Shanghai Palace (one flight up over Jake’s Paints & Hardware).

The story involves an ex-Harvard professor named Lewis Teigne who disappears mysteriously from his house near Shanghai. Perhaps he has gone over to the Japanese invaders. Perhaps he is trying to convince quarreling China that Chiang Kai-shek is indeed “the Polar Star that stays in its place,” a national symbol.

Even readers who stick with Author Cahill to the end will never unravel the whole mystery of what happened to Professor Teigne, but they will get 200,000 words—now stimulating, now baffling—about Chinese art, philosophy, politics and paradox, mixed in with gang fights, raids, a U.S. hero and heroine and hissing Japanese spies. Novelist Cahill’s polar north lies somewhere between André Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Cartoonist Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, but lacks the invigorating climate of either.