War and Spirit

A LEAF IN THE STORM--Lin Yutang--John Day ($2.50).

This story of war in China, readable at any time, is of a particular interest now which rates it high on U.S. best-seller lists. Its chief characters: a rich man, a Buddhist, a girl. Its setting: the: cities of Peking, Shanghai, Hankow, and the guerrilla-landscapes between. Its dominant theme: some of the effects of war upon the human spirit.

The two most eloquent passages in the book meditate these effects collectively: upon Chinese soldiers and civilians of all classes, above all the peasants, who have been shaken and sharpened into a transcendent courage; and upon the Japanese troops, who have been spiritually demented into the dismembering of live animals and the fantastic rapes of Nanking.

More placidly told, the main story concentrates on the young woman Tanni and the war's effect on her relationship with the Buddhist Lao Peng and with her lover Poya. Tanni is a girl with an equivocal "past," revealed with a shade more suspense than it deserves. Poya is a parlor strategist of no mean talent who can discourse on erotic esthetics and who, for a while, is all she knows enough to need.

But as she becomes more deeply involved in the lives of war refugees, the calm, breadth and mercy of Ch'an Buddhism more and more profoundly draw and disturb her. When monkish Lao Peng is so unlucky as to fall in love with her, that only makes things worse. Their difficulties are illuminated by several passages of straight theology which suggest how international is this war's religious revival.

Lin Yutang is a novelist of strict limitations. His popular-philosopher serenity betrays him into platform sleekness. A too-crafty craftsman, he complicates his action with a set of tediously artificial misunderstandings.

Yet the spirit of the story, and much of its flesh, is honest and, to newcomers in war, may well be clarifying. Moreover, the book serves as a travelogue and resume of the war in the East, from the fall of Nanking through China's first great victories in the following spring.

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