One Sinner

MORE JOY IN HEAVEN -- Morley Cal-laghan--Random House ($2.50).

In his earlier work Morley Callaghan gave promise of being a sharply sensitive realist. Perhaps it is the haze of his native Toronto, perhaps it is only the gentling-down that many a prancing Pegasus goes through as it is broken to the book trade, but he seems now to be turning into a mystically misty romantic. Since undertones of the realistic approach remain, the result is, at times, confusing.

His latest story tells of Kip Caley, bank robber and desperado, who, while serving time for one of his jobs, suddenly decides to go straight. A fellow of huge frame and equally mighty enthusiasms, he turns over his new page with all the gusto of a Billy Sunday, joins prison Bible classes, uplifts fellow convicts. The reform of so notable a character attracts wide attention, and soon newspapers, hometown politicians, even a Senator join in a successful campaign for his release. Paroled, Kip Caley strides out into the world again, too happy in his freedom, too exalted by his recent conversion to do more than burble: "I want to be a good man, to fit into things ... get a little closer to people. ..." The rest of the book is the story of his efforts to live up to his resolutions, and his eventual defeat.

The prison chaplain makes the best suggestion: that Caley take a job as his gardener until the excitement about him dies down. Instead, the Senator carries him off to the city, shows him off to his friends for a while, then--puzzled by the big fellow's innocent evangelism--gets him a sort of personal-appearance job at a night club. Caley reigns there for a time, falls in love, gets his life story printed in the newspapers. Then people again turn apathetic. With only shady prospects before him now, Caley realizes at last how little belief there was in his good intentions, how cheaply sensational the general interest had been. In the end, still trying vaguely to do right, he gets mixed up in a complicated mess, shoots a cop, is fatally wounded. Unless the title is completely ironical, this finale must be the act of redemption which causes joy in Heaven "over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."

The book contains at least one very good passage: the description of the street fight and chase in which Caley receives his death wound. Most readers will agree that Caley in his bedazzled guilelessness, his dumb trustingness, is basically well conceived. It is in the development of the story that things go astray, and it is the author's wavering method of attack that causes the trouble. A love affair that starts hard-boiled ("Aw, come on. Give me a break. . . . We all get pushed around.") goes suddenly opalescent. (". . . A part of me that is still hard and stiff is broken and everything comes flowing in light and warm. See what I mean?'') Characters, sharply delineated at first, develop inconsistencies. The plot at times becomes foggy. Most readers will end the book a little baffled--feeling as if they had been shown a brisk bit of action, but forced to view it through pink-tinted ground glass.

The Author. Stocky, black-haired

Morley Callaghan, onetime boxing champion at the University of Toronto, is now 34, has written five novels and two books of short stories since 1928. He began his literary career on the Toronto Star, where a boxing partner and fellow reporter named Ernest Hemingway was instrumental in getting his first stories published. They met again as Paris expatriates. Callaghan's moody, subdued tales on religious themes have won him a reputation for humorlessness, but he sometimes surprises his friends with neatly turned out anecdotes in the ribald vein of Mark Twain. Best example of these is a tale which tells how an amiable intoxicated sinner stumbles into a confession booth, demands to be put off at Halsted Street.

Original version of More Joy In Heaven was enacted last year in the famed case of Toronto's brilliantly reformed bank robber Norman F. ("Red") Ryan, who shortly after his release was mowed down by police who surprised him robbing a liquor store.

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