Continued Story

DEATH OF A WORLD--Jules Remains-- Knopf ($3).

This week 5,000 devoted U. S. readers can get their latest installments of the world's longest continued story. The book is Jules Remains' Death Of A World, containing the 13th and 14th volumes of his multiple-volumed Men Of Good Will, a vast, panoramic affair including several hundred characters, laid largely in pre-War France, and now totaling 3,756 pages. Five years ago, when Author Remains published his first volume and boldly announced the scope and complexity of his project (hinting that it might run to 25 volumes), some 11,000 U. S. readers bought copies. Thereafter sales settled so solidly to 5,000 copies for each installment that it was plain Author Romains had a group of readers determined to follow him to the bitter end.

In Death Of A World, the faithful 5,000 get two installments somewhat above Author Romains' average. Men Of Good Will is not a straightforward narrative embracing many characters and telling a consecutive story. Its hero is modern society as a whole, so that characters are introduced who seem to have no connection with each other, drop out of sight and reappear according to no apparent plan. The first volume, beginning in Paris in 1908, introduced Quinette, a murderer, Gurau, a radical deputy, Wazemmes, a sign painter's apprentice; their stories, appearing in alternate chapters, seemed to be related only in being laid in Paris at the same period. Later volumes described intrigue in the Catholic Church and the formation of a mysterious secret society. They introduced a young scientist, an oil magnate involved in a love affair with his partner's wife, a munitions maker with curious vices, a broken-down novelist, a successful dramatist, students, schoolgirls, fortunetellers. Major theme linking the characters was an awareness of the danger of war, which influenced their moods, their actions and above all their ambitions for the future.

Death Of A World starts off on another tangent. Mionnet, a young priest who successfully saved a bishop from scandal in an earlier volume, is sent to Rome by Gurau and Poincare to spy on Cardinal Merry del Val, Papal Secretary of State who Gurau believes is intriguing with Germany. In Rome, Mionnet collects scandals about the Cardinal and is at the point of buying a blackmailer's documents when he is summoned to the Vatican to interview Merry del Val himself. There the plot breaks off, with Mionnet, like the hero of an old-fashioned movie serial, dangling over an ecclesiastical precipice.

Most of the characters who have appeared to date reappear briefly on the eve of war: Wazemmes has become a monarchist; the munitions maker is mixed up with a sadistic woman doctor; the young scientist has begun to make a name for himself; Gurau has refused the post of Foreign Minister; Quinette is planning another murder.

By page 3,700 of Men Of Good Will, its general outlines are about as obscure as they were on page 370. The outbreak of war, threatened through 13 installments, comes as an anticlimax in the 14th. So far, Men Of Good Will adds up to a great many violent individual scenes, inevitable in a melodramatic, pre-War world, crowded with blackmailers, spies, secret societies, perverts, murderers. Until the significance of these scenes becomes clearer, following the novel is like trying to assemble a gigantic literary jigsaw puzzle, the key parts of which are not yet available.

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