Books: Genus Molge

WAR WITH THE NEWTS—Karel Capek, translated by M. & R. Weatherall—Putnam ($2.50).

One Captain van Toch, blue-eyed, beery Dutch mariner, trading for pearls along the coast of Sumatra, made the first discovery: he found, in a little-visited bay on one of the islands, a family of giant newts that walked erect when on land, could be taught to use a pearl-diver’s knife and other tools, and could even, with coaching, learn to talk. Finished rubbing his eyes, simple-minded van Toch planned merely to use his pets for pearl-fishing, but he had to get capital to do it, and once capital got involved in the thing there was hell to pay. Before you could say genus Molge there were newts all over the place: newts (bred now scientifically in huge watery enclosures and farmed out as cheap labor) building dams and breakwaters, reconstructing shorelines and adding to continents; newt-conscious intellectuals and artists, newt-inspired cinemas and musical comedies; newt-problems before the League of Nations. End comes, of course, when the newts, armed by now and tired of it all, rise against their masters and begin blowing up dams, breakwaters, shorelines and continents while mankind, in a dither, retreats to the mountains. There Author Capek (pronounced Chah-peck) leaves them, with the issue for mankind still in doubt, but definitely ominous-looking.

Why the author chose the faintly ridiculous, wildly improbable newt as the subject of his extravaganza must remain a mystery. Why he ends the book so indeterminately is easier to answer: he found he had bitten off more in the way of Wellsian fantasy than he could chew. Through the rest of the book, however, he does give about as copious a working-out of the satiric possibilities of his theme as could possibly be wished for, and while in some parts of this the creaking of the Capek brain is depressingly almost audible, in others—particularly those dealing with the grave struggles of the diplomats to cope with the plethora of newts—the irony is sharp and vigorous. In any case, at book’s end the reader will feel that he has pretty much covered the subject of newts.