Problem for Carlos

REVOLT IN SAN MARCOS (433 pp.)--Robert Carver North--Houghton M/'f-flin ($3.50).

San Marcos wasn't much of a capital city, and the country itself was immemorially backward, wretchedly poor. Two percent of its people owned 80% of the land; tenant farmers got 2-c- a day, skilled workers 7-c- an hour. On the highlands, hungry Indians scratched the barren slopes for corn, still trying to live by what they remembered of the dignified old tribal customs. And ruling the country was Dictator Ronca, a strutting, streamlined Latin American demagogue who had won the peasants' support by promising them land, only to suppress them as soon as he got to power.

This was the land that brown-skinned young Carlos Morelos grew up in, and where he learned about the simple duties man owes to man, of Chan, the Nacheetls' God of the Universe, and of Jesucristo Salvador too. But when he left his village and moved to the capital, Carlos ran up against a lot of other matters, and almost all at once. There were such puzzling things as the political democracy of John Locke, the Marxian dialectic and the news (slightly belated) of the atomic bomb. Author North seems to think that it could happen that way almost anywhere in Central America. He tells how it happened with Carlos.

Carlos got his first lessons from Don Ricardo, the liberal judge who wanted to see "a democracy in the Locke tradition." But Don Ricardo sounded mild to Carlos after the young man fell in with some of San Marcos' parlor radicals. One of them, a sottish and oracular Scot, explained to him why radicalism would gain a hold among the Indians: "And rrrememberr also, Carries, the Bolsheviks may not be rrright, but they prrresent a hope. To the rrragged and the hungrry and the sick of hearrt they prrresent a hope!" Carlos remembered it a long time, especially after the dictator's police threw him in a dungeon and his wife traded herself to Dictator Ronca in exchange for his freedom.

When the successful revolt against Ronca came, it was thanks to the alliance of Don Ricardo's liberals and the Communists. But Don Ricardo wondered what the Communists would do if they got the cabinet posts they demanded, especially the police ministry. In the end, with troubled Carlos at his side, he drove in the darkness to make a deal with what was left of the old Ronquistas, the dictator's former followers.

Which cause in San Marcos, or in the world, was most nearly right? What should an honest man do? Carlos was not prepared to judge; he was still thinking.

Revolt in San Marcos offers no pat answers, closes merely by posing its problems honestly. If Author North had as much skill in creating a full gallery of credible characters as he has in drawing Carlos and his problems against the convincing background, he might have written a great novel. It is still a pretty good first one.

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