RETURN JOURNEY by R.F. DELDERFIELD 318 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.
R.F. Delderfield is to the novel what Upstairs, Downstairs is to television. The man is a good read, and for the kind of good-read addict who hates himself the next morning, Delderfield can be justified as literature too. "A modern Trollope, a latter-day Galsworthy!" the critics cry, while his stories slip down as smoothly as soap opera.
Return Journey was published in England in 1967 but is now being offered to American fans for the first time. It shows Delderfield up to his old virtues, dealing with people up to old vices. In an English seaside resort more than 30 years ago, "Pip" Stuart, a young photographer, seems about to marry the ironmonger's daughter and settle down to a lifetime of prams with now and then a pint at the corner pub. But a West Country Emma Bovary puts Pip's still-life future out of focus. Bored to a frenzy by small-town domesticity, Lorna, a doctor's wife, passes on to Pip the 20th century's most communicable disease: restlessness. With her red sports car, and golden hair, Lorna comes close to parodying a jazz-age flapper. Still, while the lowerbrow in the schizoid Delderfield reader may thrill to such blood-stirring experiences as skinny dips and off-coast storms, his higherbrowed self can find plenty of social realism. Delderfield makes his reader see—and even smell—boarding-houses with names like Resthaven and Shangri-La.
The story is told in flashback as Pip, now in his 50s, returns to a home town circled by trailers and transformed by "the telly and the transistor, the small car and the tourist agencies." The author's moral: They don't make small towns the way they used to. Delderfield died in 1972. But as long as his books flourish, nobody will be able to say that about the novel.
THE DOGS OF WAR by FREDERICK FORSYTH 408 pages. Viking. $7.95.
With each successive story, Novelist Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal, Odessa File) grows richer and more book clubbable. He also finds it harder and harder to get his action to explode without leading up to it with an interminable train of exposition—in this case short lectures on every conceivable subject from the state of the world's platinum market to exactly how a consignment of German Schmeissers for an African coup d'état should be welded into oil drums—the better to foil the customs with, my dear. Forsyth's fact-filled thriller about a bad moneyman in London and how he uses a white mercenary to topple an African dictator and get the local platinum concession does not really get going until about page 384. The last 24 pages are almost worth waiting for, though, and the far-flung film sure to result will no doubt be galvanizing.
IMPEACHMENT: A HANDBOOK by CHARLES L BLACK JR. 90 pages. Yale University Press. $5.95. $1.95 paperback.