House That Was a Home

THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG (345 pp.] --Richard Mason--World ($3.95).

At the heart of The World of Suzie Wong lies one of the hoariest of truisms: prostitutes are people. And if its heroine, Hong Kong Suzie, is like most girls, only more so, it must at all points be remembered that she needs the money. Besides, Suzie could not help it. She had been seduced in Shanghai by her guardian uncle. She could not read and she could not write beyond spelling out her name, and even that invariably had the "z" written backwards. But she was very good at her work, and once she reached Hong Kong her neat little figure and native shrewdness made it certain that she would get along. On the debit side is Suzie's baby, the byproduct of a liaison with an English cad who had promised marriage and then walked out on her, but she loves it dearly and it does not noticeably interfere with her profession.

There are those who will deplore The World of Suzie Wong and its heroine, but even before publication the novel meets most of the preconditions for success: it has been sold to the movies for a reported price of more than $200,000, and its publisher has backed it with a $10,000 advertising budget. To British Author Richard Mason, all this may confirm his solid belief that in fiction the twain will always meet if East is a lovely chick and West is a broad-minded Englishman determined to vault the color bar.

Robert Lomax comes to the Nam Kok Hotel in Hong Kong looking for a cheap room with a view. He is an artist with little money and less Chinese, and it takes him a while to discover that he has moved into a house of assignation. The visitors are mostly sailors of all nations; the girls are of various shapes and sizes. And of course there is Suzie. Hero 'Lomax, an easygoing type, becomes quite fond of the world of Suzie Wong. He has no money to spend, but he gets to be a friend and confidant of all the girls--even something of a house pet. Suzie, it develops, is no ordinary employee, and it soon becomes understood that she is Robert's steady--at first in the chastest way. But it is not human for such a girl as Suzie to play "just friends'' indefinitely. To Lomax, the girl is a trial. She takes up with other men (only for money, of course) and makes him writhe in agony. It all ends just beautifully, however, with Robert a successful painter, Suzie his wife with her trade behind her, and the final prospect of a happy life in a mountain village.

What in other hands could easily have become a leering and vulgar yarn winds up here as an exercise of the love-thy-neighbor. do-not-cast-the-first-stone school. Author Mason has managed an indelicate background in a quite delicate way. Once a reader becomes wrapped in his easy style and artless examination of the oldest profession with Oriental trappings, the book's unintended moral is plainly spelled out: that a man as easy to please as Robert will always be fair game for those Suzies who are born to please.

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