War in the Air

THE NAVIGATOR (177 pp.)--Jules Roy --Alfred Knopf ($3).

Afterwards--after the heart-stopping order, "Prepare to abandon aircraft!", after the shock of the opening chute and the jarring drop onto a British beet field --Lieut. Ripault, Free French navigator flying with the R.A.F., lost all contact with the war. He was the only survivor of a two-plane crackup and he hardly knew what had happened. "I'm not clear about anything," he told his squadron commander. At the moment, he did not care.

The truth was that Navigator Ripault had never cared about the war. He did not know how. He was one of those lonely thinkers, the introverts who went through the motions but never really took part in the conflict. Novelist Jules Roy, a onetime infantryman in the French army and World War II R.A.F. bomber pilot, writes about a navigator who is a distant, haunted figure, indistinguishable from all uniformed youthful intellectuals. His problems typify the problems of every individual lost in the impersonal service: companions suddenly turned dull and insensible, sudden fear that makes him weasel out of a flight with an inept pilot, an insensitive squadron commander who lives by the book. The girl he loves is all the girls men loved in outposts of the war-vague, ephemeral, but the memory of "life and compassion, and ... the deep gentle warmth of her surrendering to him." Yet, devoid of identity, Lieut. Ripault remains stubbornly alive. There were thousands like him; he takes on stature as he suggests their struggle to survive. And like those others, the navigator comes back to finish the fight. Because he is attracted to the weak, he chooses to fly with a pilot who is so scared that he cannot see the field lights when he leaves on a night mission. And now, as love cures the navigator, so it is Ripault's confidence that makes the pilot whole. The lumbering Halifax, V for Victory, makes a successful takeoff, and lasts long enough to bomb a Wuerzburg ball-bearing factory before it goes down in flames.

Such men as Navigator Ripault, Novelist Roy seems to be saying, never recovered from their immersion in such a war. For all the obvious drawbacks of translation, the little story makes its point.

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