Upper-Class India

SON OF THE MOON (383 pp.)--Joseph George Hitrec--Harper ($3).

These days, there are two ways of describing a novel laid in India: as the best thing of its sort since Forster's Passage to India--or not as good as Forster. This one is not as good. But it is a cool and intelligent book in its own right. The Harper Prize Novel, it is the work of Yugoslavian-born Joseph Hitrec, 36, who went to India for a vacation in 1933, stayed 14 years.

It may be that Passage to India has inadvertently done a disservice to contemporary readers by its very excellence. It has laid too heavy a shadow on the imagination, casting each new work in the model of its grave and thoughtful characterizations and demanding of each something of the haunting real-and-unreal atmosphere that has come to be identified in the minds of Westerners as India.

Hero Without Aim. But India is no longer the India of Forster's book. The hero of Son of the Moon is a young Hindu aristocrat--his family traces its descent from the moon--who has made the first solo flight from India to England. Vijay has acted and become a hero, idolized by his people, with limitless opportunities before him.

His English experience includes an affair with an English scenic designer, satisfying his vague desire since adolescence to go to bed with a white woman; scrapbooks filled with clippings on his flight; dinners in his honor; studies in aeronautics, half-purposeful, partly an excuse for remaining in England; candid talks with Englishmen whose fairness and honesty about India's nationalism are a surprise to him after the Britons he had known in India.

Meanwhile the excitement over his achievement has ebbed away. What is there for him to do? He plans, vaguely, to fly around the world, lecturing on India. But, back home, the native princes, who might be interested in financing him if he were a tout for dancing girls, turn him down: it would be less expensive to found a chair of Indian music at an English university.

Bored and restless, he cannot give his energies wholeheartedly to anything, to his mother's devout faith in the old traditions, though its rituals move him deeply, or to the independence movement, though he is aware that he is consequently left out of much of the life of the people around him.

He has an affair with a tough little Eurasian named Thelma Morrison--one of those clinical matings, ruthlessly antiromantic, which seem to be a feature of contemporary fiction, whether laid in Bombay or Westchester. His sister goes to jail in a riot, his friend Salim is assassinated and he himself attacked in ambush. His project for an airline transporting pilgrims comes to nothing (the pilgrims get airsick) and he settles down to a job as a commercial airlines pilot.

The Chosen One. Meanwhile the girl his family had selected for him to marry has grown up. The fact that she has been chosen for him dulls his interest in her. She has, however, become a character of decision as his indecision grows; the same movements in Indian life that have left no place for him have given her maturity and confidence. When plans are made to marry her to someone else, he seduces her, finding in her a love which lacks the cold sensuality of his affairs and gives him a purpose and a sense of obedience to his own place in life.

Such is the content of Son of the Moon. It is a novel of some passion and excitement, and the slow accumulation of brief scenes, following the pattern of Passage to India, is very nearly incompatible with such passion. Here & there the novel has a kind of Oriental power of hallucination: experiences blend and retreat; characters dissolve; a spell is cast by the very remoteness of the happenings so precisely described. At such moments the novel seems a blend of several books, about an India that seems partly familiar and partly a new world of still formless action.

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