Books: What’s It Ail About?

THE IMAGE OF A DRAWN SWORD (242 pp.)—Jocelyn Brooke—Knopf ($2.75).

A doctor probably would have told Reynard Langrish that what he needed was a long vacation. Besides his chronic catarrh, he was having trouble with his hearing, and his sense of smell wasn’t as sharp as it should be. Even cigarettes had begun to taste bad. What was worse, his home in the provincial English town where he lived with his deaf mother was getting on his nerves. After a day at his dull bank clerk’s job, his restlessness would become intolerable, driving him out for long, aimless walks. On the rainswept night that the strapping young stranger stopped to ask the way to a nearby town, Langrish felt as though a “seismic disturbance” were taking place in his brain.

What happens to Langrish after that, in The Image of a Drawn Sword, proves that British Novelist Jocelyn Brooke can create as violent fictional disturbances as anyone now writing in English. Compared to it, his first tense little gothic novel, The Scapegoat (TIME, Jan. 9, 1950), was a mild emotional debauch.

The Truth Is … The stranger, a Captain Roy Archer, is attached to an infantry regiment stationed near by. From the first moment, Captain Archer fascinates and dominates Langrish, and when the captain invites him to drive into town to see a boxing match that night, Langrish happily accepts. Everything about Archer is mysterious: his talk about an imminent “crisis” and the need for dedicated soldiers, his warning that the “other lot,” the enemy, is getting ready to attack, the tattooed sword and snake on his arm.

Soon the captain has Langrish training with him secretly, at night, to toughen him, finally gets Langrish’s promise to enlist in his battalion. But when Langrish, confused by all the mystery, desperately insists on knowing what it’s all about, Archer replies: “All right, then—the truth is that nobody knows.” The enemy? “I only wish I knew.”

Despite Archer’s puzzling mumbo jumbo, the idea of enlistment excites Langrish, begins to seem a wonderful means of escape from his dull life. He misses the enlistment date, but while taking a walk one day, stumbles on to the battalion camp and is forced into service against his will. His complaints are brushed off. He sees Archer from time to time, but the captain, now a major and soon a colonel, seems not to recognize him.

The Search Is … Still bewildered though he is, Langrish nevertheless feels a new sense of well-being in the battalion, and his World War II experience quickly wins him a promotion. His health returns; he can even enjoy cigarettes again. But when he tries to escape for a short visit to his mother, he is thrown into jail. Escaping again, he kills a military policeman, gets home to find his mother dead, the house a shambles. When Archer comes to get him, Langrish shoots him, but Archer forgives him, dies with Langrish’s promise to “come through” because the enemy is on the march. Strangely happy, Langrish starts back for camp, “aware that past and future were fused at last in the living moment.”

Despite its own mumbo jumbo and its deliberate lack of clarity, The Image of a Drawn Sword is a disturbing allegory: the desperate desire of Mr. Average for an existence in which love and comradeship replace tension and uncertainty. The book’s elaborate use of symbolism, its bewildering time scheme in which past & present merge crazily, sharply recall the brooding of Novelist Franz Kafka. There is one important difference: Kafka’s theme was man’s search for God. Brooke’s dazed hero would settle for something which he almost, but never quite, comes out and names: brotherhood on earth.