THE GAME AND THE GROUND, by PeterVansittart (87pp.; Abelard-Schuman; $3), deals with the war wreckage that can never wholly be cleared away —the human ruins. Among such victims of war, children, with their mixture of helplessness and guiltlessness, are the most poignant. Around a camp of brutalized children and their would-be healers in a thinly disguised German locale, British Author Peter Vansittart has fashioned a melancholy novel that is sometimes static but frequently moving. Two brothers, Eric and the nameless first-person narrator of the story, have turned their war-ravaged country estate, Kasalten, into a rehabilitation center. The youngsters, turned savage by war and its aftermath, very nearly rule the place with their catapults, clubs, knives and even pistols. They move in organized gangs—Wolves, Eagles, Foxes, Bears—and even boast a secret-police force named Caesar.
It takes a special kind of courage on the part of the impromptu social workers who man the camp to win either the confidence or the compliance of these child gangsters. Threatened with a knifing by a Wolf, good, kindly Eric holds out both hands and is viciously slashed, after which the boy throws the knife at Eric’s feet and collapses wailing to the ground. What enables the staff to go on is the knowledge that the children have been more sinned against than sinning. There is the little boy who has never been heard to utter a word, another youngster who drops mute and frozen to the earth at the merest drone of an approaching plane.
Just as the staff is beginning to awaken the children from the nightmare of violence, past and present, the narrator’s twin brother Nicky arrives. Nicky is handsome, hypnotic and unregenerate, a nostalgic Nazi still capable of strutting his party uniform in the midst of the Berlin airlift. As Nicky stuffs the children’s ears with bogus war exploits, the camp’s tensions come to a seething boil, and the novel spills over into melodrama, j murder and suicide. Novelist Vansittart, 36, is an English teacher in a London I school; his compassion and scrupulosity in distinguishing good from bad Germans are in generous contrast to the views of his late uncle, Lord Vansittart, whose implacable antipathy could be summed up in an adaptation of the elder Cato: Ceterum censeo Germaniam esse delendam.
SOUND OF A DISTANT HORN, by Sven Stolpe (301 pp.; Sheed & Ward; $3.95), is within echoing distance of the works of François Mauriac and Graham Greene, in which anguished would-believers are pursued by both hell and heaven. Swedish Novelist Sven-Stolpe, 51, a Roman Catholic convert, tells of Edvard Kansdorf, an expatriate middle-aged Swede dying of cancer in Paris. He is a relapsed convert to Catholicism who tries to drown his consciousness as well as his conscience in cognac. The nausea rather than the pain of living makes him almost yearn for death. Around him revolve other people and other lives like planets in a void, always near enough to hail but never near enough to help.
There is his agnostic doctor who offers Kansdorf morphine and a mercy killing. The doctor’s wife had married him on the rebound when the man she really loved jilted her. This erstwhile suitor in turn became a Dominican friar, and to him Author Stolpe devotes a lengthy subplot. Father Perezcaballero is the bedeviled Graham Greene priest of the mislaid vocation. A brilliant preacher-intellectual, he has every gift but faith, all knowledge but that of the dimensions of his own pride. Brought to an appalled recognition of his vanity and emptiness, Perezcaballero somehow enables the dying Kansdorf to find God in a mystical crucifixion reverie while himself regaining his lost calling. Loosely plotted but tautly written, the book relies finally on devices that are more pious than imaginative. By protesting his faith too much, Novelist Stolpe has made his fictional foray into original sin less gripping than that of, say, Albert Camus, a professed atheist, whose The Fall (TIME, Feb. 18) leaves the most complacently irreligious reader under a conviction of sin and the dread need to examine the state of his own soul.
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