Flood

DELUGE--Sydney Fowler Wright--Cosmopolitan Book Corporation ($2.50).

The Story. Land trembled and sank, winds roared, and the waters rose. India was no more, China a forgotten dream, Southern Europe gone, Germany a desolation below the sea, England too--but for a bit of midlands which persisted as a group of islands. Some few inhabitants had not fled mistakenly North: Martin, separated by the floods from wife and children; Claire, "like a valkyrie"; and a handful of miners, laborers, vagabonds, with too few women to go 'round.

Claire, once almost a channel swimmer, turns up on one of the smaller islands, but chafes under the obvious intentions of its two male citizens, and dives off in the wake of departing seagulls, just as a renewed upheaval submerges the island anyway. An overnight's swim brings her to company less aggressive but very dull, so after a few weeks' rest she swims off again--in search of a mate. Him she finds in Martin, erstwhile lawyer, who is quickly adapting himself to the laws of nature--storing up loot for the winter, beating off dogs that have already turned wolflike, and finally battling with brutish fellows for the possession of his woman.

Follows matter enough for a dozen penny dreadfuls, threepenny thrillers: a fight with sledgehammer and dirk in the lurid shadows of a gypsy fire--Claire's body gleaming white but for the dark cords that bind her ankles and wrists; a struggle in the dank blackness of a railway tunnel which a gang of Claire's suitors blockade at one end, while others sneak in opposite: "Kill the man, but save the wench! . . ."A relic of civilized scruple holds Martin from killing a hairy giant furnaceman, because he has sprawled over the tracks and technically is down. But Claire sees the prostrate giant heave a rock, and, with no scruples, jabs him, hacks, thwacks, kills, saving Martin's life.

In the nick of slaughter Martin and Claire are rescued from the black and bloody tunnel by a search party which turns out to have been sent by Martin's antediluvial wife, Helen, whom he had thought drowned. Before her presence can soil the lovers' passion, however, Helen is kidnaped by a fresh band of lustful and flood-maddened males.

Martin and Claire, faced by the challenge of Helen's kidnaping, sink their own love in a wild, valorous ride to rescue her. Helen's abductor is shot by Claire, who realizes in the heat of killing that she cannot take Martin from his wife of "wildrose beauty."

One supposes that Claire will have to content herself with one of the numerous flood-created bachelors who stalk woman-hungry through the book; but the last page of this palpitating yarn brings a grand climax that sends the reader's imagination reeling off upon further and seemingly inevitable crises and conflicts.

The Significance. Man has periodically concerned himself with what this world might be were it not what it is. In recent years Herbert George Wells has held the monopoly in fatiloquent speculation; here is another's prediction, and logical enough, geologically, anthropologically. But Deluge announces itself not as a prophetic tract on social philosophy, but as romance, thus defying comparison with The Republic of Plato, or More's Utopia, or even Gulliver's Travels. The author does indeed seem to advocate demagogy, and polygamy; does indeed say his say against the established practice of medicine and law, and the fashion of childlessness. But all so casually that the reader need not take him seriously, is in fact far too engrossed with the tale to bother with the sociology, or the presence of occasional unwarranted melodrama. For Deluge is an excellent good yarn. It is also this month's Book of the Month, chosen by the famed club of that name and purchased by its 73,000 members.

The Author. Poet and editor of the English quarterly, Poetry and the Play, Sydney Fowler Wright, has made a survey of contemporary poetry, and a translation of Dante's Inferno. His friends doubted his finding a publisher for Deluge. Modest, he first printed it at his own expense, and found immediate applause. Fifty three years old, he is father of nine children.