Picaroon

JUAN IN CHINA -- Eric Linklater -- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

For Tories who like to chuckle over their cigars, Eric Linklater is the right sort of company. His Juan in America (TIME, May 4, 1931), a clever but kindly satire on the U. S., tickled many a reader pink.

Juan in China, a continuation of his picaroon-hero's progress, is longer between laughs, thinned at times to the gin-&-water consistency of the late lightly lickerish Thorne Smith. Frankly a farce, Juan in China is a further disappointment to those who still hoped better things of Eric Linklater, a further confirmation to those who never expected anything better. But since by this week Juan has gone halfway home to England, hopeful readers still looked forward, thought what a really good time he and they might have if he ever gets there.

Juan's Chinese adventures open in a California nudist colony, where Juan finds himself, "naked and ashamed"--for he is a right-thinking, old-fashioned philanderer --for love of the beauteous Kuo Kuo.

When Kuo Kuo joins him there she cannot help laughing, and that ends their brief stay. They take ship to China; she to aid her country against the Japanese invader, Juan for the ride. Once in Shanghai, Kuo Kuo gets more patriotic, less amorous, by the hour. During the bombardment of Chapei, Shanghai suburb, he rescues two beautiful sisters, Russians but Siamese twins. Since the other fair charmer is never away, he cannot be happy with either, but he has some close calls.

While Kuo Kuo gets more mysterious and unmanageable with her secret plans, Juan solaces himself with Harriet, a travel-book writer. That affair lasts until Harriet's professional duties call her away to the pirates of Bias Bay. Then Juan falls into Kuo Kuo's clutches again, and almost before he knows it he finds himself in a tin-armored tank advancing against the Japanese intrenchments, under heavy but inaccurate fire. How Author Linklater extricates his hero from that parlous position is a caution.

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