Pluck & Poignancy

IKE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE (310 pp.)-- Nevil Shute-- Morrow ($3.95).

There are two kinds of authors -- those who write better than they plot and those who plot better than they write. With his 22nd novel, Veteran Nevil Shute again proves himself one of the best practitioners of Group 2. Shute's surefire system is to take some typical or moving theme --nuclear fallout in On the Beach, race prejudice in The Chequer Board, homeless children in Pied Piper. He weaves in plenty of stirring incidents and peoples his pages with strongly sympathetic, highly moral characters who land deep in a pit of trouble in the first chapter, are often still there by the last.

Author Shute, 59, who was an aeronautical engineer and military pilot, this time returns to his first love, flying. His Canadian-born hero, Johnny Pascoe, has been barnstorming the world since 1915 and, now in his 60s, operates a small airfield at back-country Buxton in Tasmania. Flying a mercy mission to rescue a child stricken with appendicitis, Pascoe crashes on a barren stretch of the Tasmanian coast. His skull is fractured, and he is tended only by the child's distraught mother, but his friends rally round. Chief of these is Ronnie Clarke, who volunteers to fly in a doctor through rough weather, over mountains and along the unmapped coast.

Clarke's first attempt fails (nothing comes easy to a Shute hero), and he returns exhausted to Pascoe's house in Buxton, broods over Pascoe's mementos, stumbles to Pascoe's bed in Pascoe's pajamas. He dreams and, through a not-too-convincing display of Shute magic, becomes transformed into the Johnny Pascoe of World War I: an ace in the air, a hellion on the ground, the lover and husband of Dancer Judy Lester. Clarke's next dream carries him, as Johnny Pascoe, through the years between the wars, disillusionment and divorce from Judy, and love and tragedy with Brenda Marshall, a heroine as high-minded as himself. The third dream sweeps Johnny on to fulfillment as the senior pilot of Aus-Can Airline and to the faintest hint of incest as, all unknowing, he falls in love with his own daughter. But sex in a Shute novel is so aseptic that this episode could scarcely offend an encampment of campfire girls.

With the dreams out of the way, Ronnie Clark can get on with his rescue mission. Question, not answered till the final pages: Will he arrive in time? As always, Shute writes in plain, unadorned prose, packs his book with pluck and poignancy, and handles his flashbacks as easily as he would a basic trainer.

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