Dilemma in the Heat

^ CARAVAN PASSES (304 pp.) --George Tabor I -- Appleton-Century -Crofts ($3).

To write novels in the international manner, as Andre Malraux and Arthur Koestler do, a novelist needs to have been around. Geographically, at least, George Tabori has the qualifications. He was born in Hungary, became a British subject after many travels, now lives in France. His best book was a political novel about Italy (Companions of the Left Hand) ; another was a psycho-thriller, set in Egypt (Original Sin), which was chiefly notable for the longest dust storm in modern 1't-erature. This time, Tabori has written a perspiring little novel about Arabia, and garnished it with murder, intrigue and rebellion.

Some of the local color is pretty fine, e.g., the date plantations of the hinterland, street urchins sardonically shoeshin-ing the bare feet of a beggar, the Arabian sun driving a whole town close to frenzy. The story itself serves up the melodrama hot and mostly straight.

Let the Knife Slip? It is chiefly Dr. Varga's story. He is ship's doctor of the Ceylon Star, a man who finds the sea a sanctuary and goes ashore as little as possible. Varga's trouble begins when the governor of Port Aarif, a lecherous old tyrant named El Bekkaa, comes aboard and insists that he be treated for an ailment that turns out, on diagnosis, to be cancer.

There is no escaping his duty; Dr. Varga decides to operate. But he finds himself increasingly distracted by: 1) Pamela Vaughan, the good-looking nurse from the British hospital in Port Aarif, and 2) a whole array of El Bekkaa's subjects, who urge him to let his knife slip during the operation.

As Varga listens to the list of the governor's villainies, he can't help sympathizing with the malcontents, but then, there is his Hippocratic oath. What should he do? Moreover, what should he do about Nurse Vaughan? Nothing works out right for Dr. Varga. He loses both the girl and the patient, and his own brief career in Port Aarif comes to an abrupt end when the governor's bodyguards take after him with silver daggers.

Tragedy of the Liberal? At this point, where he might have slapped his story shut with a bang, Novelist Tabori gives it a twisting curve; he adds a long Part Two describing an unlabeled Arabian revolutionary movement which has been fighting to overthrow the governor. The epilogue has little to do with the bulk of the novel, and it raises the disconcerting suspicion that Tabori meant Dr. Varga's story as some sort of significant parable. This suspicion is confirmed by the dust jacket, whereon the author calls his story "a comment on the tragedy of the liberal." All in all, this is a little like being taken on a tour of Coney Island and then being told that it was all meant as an exhibit of the tragedy of life in the city.

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