Vision & Martyrdom

You, THE JURY (346 pp.]--Mary Bore/en--Longmans, Green ($3).

Martin Merriedew, the hero of Mary Borden's*latest novel, You, the Jury, was a singular child. He had some inner illumination that drew people's attention to him. He spoke sometimes to his playmates about God; and sometimes he broke off play and left them, saying, "I must go now. I have to be alone." During the first World War, while still a boy. he visited wounded soldiers in a hospital near the English village he lived in, and there he felt the consciousness of a gift of healing.

When Martin grew up he became a doctor, but only as a step toward a higher vocation, which he soon began to fulfill by founding a sort of Christian religious cult of his own. When the next war came, Martin registered as a conscientious objector, and served as a medical orderly in North Africa and Italy. One night in a canteen, he had a vision of the infinite brotherhood of human souls. In obedience to it. he called on the British soldiers around him to follow him on a mission of love to the German lines. Instead, his astounded comrades dragged him off to the guardhouse and Martin was tried for treason.

The main issue of Author Borden's novel--God or Caesar--is presented clearly in the account of the trial. But the human significance of the problem is blurred by the author's strong suggestion of a superhuman solution: Martin is martyred under circumstances markedly resembling those under which Christ was sent to the Cross--as indeed his whole story is touched up with quiet little parallels to Christ's life.

The Second Coming is an ambitious subject for a novel. Dostoevsky touched on the idea in the Grand Inquisitor scene of The Brothers Karamazov. But it probably cannot be done in Author Borden's smoothly elegant manner, punctuated in startling places by punchy little colloquialisms--rather as though a piece of second-rate Henry James had been edited by Red Smith.

Still & all. You, the Jury pleased the Book-of-the-Month Club/which is offering it this month as the companion selection to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

-Aunt by marriage (through his ex-wife Ellen, her niece) to Presidential Candidate Adlai Stevenson.

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