Sophomoric Scream

THE ISLAND--Claire Spencer--Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Five years ago Claire Spencer caught many a U. S. reader's eye with her first novel, a black-avised melodrama called Gallows' Orchard. Because its youthful angularities seemed to hint of power in its not-yet-matured bone, critics reserved judgment, hoped to see its promise performed in Author Spencer's second book. Last week, after reading The Island, they wrote off Author Spencer as a case of arrested artistic development.

Author Spencer writes violently, too often as one beating the air. Metaphors meant to be mighty come out merely mixed: "Soon the sun would be lost to sight, dragging its garden of colours behind it. Then the black clouds would cool away or sink like heavy anchors, and with the downing of the gaudy light, the sky would be peppered with blinking stars, gasping for life, weak from the tumult of the sun's going." Her violent story:

Twin brothers, sons of a fisherman on a little island off Scotland's coast, suddenly discover that they hate each other dearly. Gavan falls in love with pretty, nitwitted Lucy Morrisy, but it is Duncan who enjoys her, and wins her love. When she is caught, she tells her hard-bitten mother that Gavan was her seducer. Gavan gets a thoroughgoing thrashing but he marries Lucy, which is what he thinks he wants. Too late he discovers his affinity in a less twittery creature, the solid Sarah. But when Duncan continues to cuckold him and Lucy hangs herself in shame, it is too much: with pleasure Gavan murders his brother, loses his sanity, dumps the corpse into a boat and sets sail with the faithful Sarah into a big storm that finishes them and the story.

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