Fantastic First

THE WINGS OF THE MORNING--Edward S. Hyams--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Many a young English novel today is obsessed with the fear of war, Fascism, Communism, Democracy's collapse, neurosis. Allegorical figures of Fascism, Communism, Democracy wrestle semi-essay-istically, through Wellsian plots, with a hero nebulous enough to squeeze at last into some sort of mystical bomb shelter. Such novels seem curiously at odds with the authors' vigorous personal activities--mountain climbing, travel, hiking, sports.

Latest of such stories is The Wings of the Morning, a 500-page fantasy by a 28-year-old Englishman who works for a London printing firm, flies a plane, likes good food and wine, fast horses and cars. His first published novel, The Wings of the Morning, tells of a medical genius who becomes equally famed as a best-selling satirist. When his young wife, a beautiful Communist, is killed in an accident, the doctor retires snarling to a cottage, makes friends with a philosopher-cop, gets mixed up in the strange suicide of an egomaniac artist, who personifies nihilism, Fascism, middle-class decline, spiritual corruption. Next the doctor founds a "lay order for the conservation of liberalism and decency." Also involved are his friend the cop, an undertaker, a journalist, the Spanish Civil War, a miscellaneous assortment of other People and events--Author Hyams evidently being under the impression that the fantastic and the dramatic are synonymous.

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