Nibbling Abbey

TIDES of MONT ST.-MICHEL--Roger Vercel--Random House ($2.50).

Much has been written about Mont-Saint-Michel, the famous medieval abbey which covers a steep granite islet off the coast of France, and in summer is in turn covered with tourists. In Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres it has inspired a literary masterpiece. But although the Abbey has long been a writers' and tourists' favorite, no one had thought to write about its guides. That oblique distinction has now been attained by Tides of Mont St.-Michel, whose author won the Goncourt Prize in 1934.

Hero is strapping, serious-minded Andre Brelet, son of a bankrupt shipbuilder, who as a last resort takes a job as an Abbey guide. His wife Laura is the spoiled daughter of a bankrupt millowner, sullen, snobbish, shallow, a shrewish jade from her blonde head to her painted toes.

Once Andre and Laura are badly settled in their bleak Abbey apartment, the rest of the story dramatizes the question, Whom will Andre give in to?--his wife, who despises his job, or the Abbey, which at first depresses him, then begins "nibbling" at him, finally swallows him up completely. Instead of the musty, semi-mechanical creatures he expected to find in his fellow guides, he finds sophisticated, witty, sensitive men who have simply come to prefer life in the Abbey to the corrupt world of "the people down below." Treacherous, putty-like quicksands and fog, harsh winters and isolation add themselves to the charm of the Abbey's sombre architectural beauties. Finally even Andre's aversion to accepting tips is nibbled away. He still tells himself his job is only a makeshift, but when he is offered a better place, and finds a way to refuse it and throw out his wife at the same time, he jumps at the chance.

As in Author Vercel's previous four novels published in the U. S. (In Sight of Eden, Captain Conan, Salvage, Lena), the story is told in terse, dramatic style. And, like them, Tides of Mont St.-Michel is about equally good and bad. Good are the descriptions of storms, fogs, quicksands, natural violence; bad, melodramatic are the descriptions of the storms and fogs of human relations.

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