To Death

THE ROYAL WAY--Andre Malraux-- Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Though all novelists tacitly agree that their proper study is Man, some merely tickle or tattoo their subject. Serious novelists take a knife to him. Author Malraux's, Man's Fate (TIME. June 25), proved him to be of the surgical sort. Since not everyone can calmly witness the bloody business of such an operation, however earnestly and skilfully performed, many drew back from the spectacle of Man's Fate with shuddering dislike. The Royal Way will hardly please them better, though the surface excitement of its melodrama should make it a more popular performance.

Like the late Joseph Conrad, Malraux sets his story against a sinister and savage background, gives it, without Conrad's ambiguity, a deeper than surface significance. Man's fate, he implicitly says, is death, but there is a royal way to it, for those who have the courage to take it.

Claude Vannec, a young French archeologist who feels himself an Ishmael, is on his way to Cambodia, obsessed by dreams of Asia: "The marching forth of armies in the scented dusk loud with cicadas, the horses' hoofs stirring up dust-clouds dark with slowly veering columns of mosquitoes, shrill cries of caravans beside the tepid fords, envoys waiting for the tide by mudflats spangled with shoals of stranded fish, blued by a mist of butterflies above, and old kings rotten with caresses--and then that other dream, the dream that never left him. of shrines and gods of stone, mantled in green moss, frogs sprawling on their shoulders, their fallen heads beside them, pitted and time-scarred." Claude has a theory that somewhere along the ancient Royal Way--now the jungle-covered boundary between Siam and the "unpacified area"--are undiscovered temples with valuable carvings, perhaps treasure.

The strength of his one-man expedition is doubled when he strikes up an acquaintanceship with Perken, a German-Danish adventurer of unsavory reputation who has spent his life among the savages of the interior, and who is planning a search in those parts for a French deserter, wanted by the authorities. Together Perken and Claude find the Royal Way, eventually discover a temple with valuable bas-reliefs, which they hack off, load on their bullock-carts. Then they begin the slow fight through the jungle back to safety and fortune. First their drivers desert. Then they fall into the hands of the savage Mois. In the village where they are held captive Perken finds the French deserter he is looking for--blinded and chained to a grindstone. Though badly wounded, Perken bluffs their way free and they head for the mountains of his friendly tribes. But his wound festers and they have to abandon their precious bas-reliefs. Long before they reach the mountains they know that Perken at least will die, even if Claude escapes the pursuing Mois.

In Perken's philosophy of death Author Malraux seems to voice his own: "It seems to me sometimes that I am staking myself, all that I am, on a single moment --my last." As Claude watches his dying friend he thinks: "Ah, if only they existed, those gods of theirs, and he might, even at the cost of never-ending torment, howl in their faces, like the baying dogs, the bitter truth--that no hope of heaven, no promise of reward, nothing can justify the end of any human life!"

The Author is young (33) but considered by many a critic the most portentous cloud on the French literary horizon. A brilliant writer, he is no worker in enamel. His rare epigrams ("Youth is a religion which, in the long run, a man has always to retract") are the only tricolorations in his style. The world he writes of, in terms of savagery, torture, bloodshed, is too death-ridden to be neat.

Man's Fate echoed Malraux's experience as a revolutionary in China's bloody years, 1925-27, when he was Commissioner of Propaganda for the government of the South, helped stage the Canton insurrection. He could supply at least the scenery for The Royal Way from his archeological explorations in Cambodia and Siam. A publisher's assistant (house of Gallimard), he takes adventurous holidays, last year flew across the Great Arabian Desert and reported the discovery of the legendary city of Sheba (TIME, March 19).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.