Books: Storm Over India

THE RAINS CAME—Louis Bromrield—Harpers ($2.75).

In Ranchipur. mythical capital of a small Indian principality of the same name, a mixed congregation of people are waiting with tense impatience for the June rains to break the heat of a particularly torrid spring. There are the kindly old Maharajah and his sharp old spouse, the

Maharani; Tom Ransome, lean, good-looking profligate and world-wanderer; Fern Simon, pretty daughter of the resident missionary; Major Safti, brilliant native surgeon, and Miss MacDaid, his head nurse; Lord Esketh, a self-made peer, and his lady; attendant functionaries, members of the garrison, dried-up and dissatisfied English ladies.

The weather is not the sole cause of their tension: the close, gossipy air of the colony contains other conflicts. Fern, sought by a young Army officer, is in love with the cynical Ransome. Miss MacDaid. despite race-prejudice, is hopelessly enamored of the high-souled but brown-skinned Major Safti. Lovely, lickerish Lady Esketh revives a past entanglement with Ransome, simultaneously sets a determined cap for the surgeon. They are all treading on each other’s erotic heels in this fashion when the rains come—this time with catastrophic force, accompanied by an earthquake which for ten days isolates the community. And Author Bromfield, having maneuvered his characters into one of those “marooned-in-the-midst-of-civilization” crises so tempting to novelists lately, sets to work to see how much in the way of naked emotions he can get out of the situation.

By diligent digging he gets out a fair amount, though most readers may fee! that his results are too pat and his method too tedious to make first-class reading. All the principal characters are treated to full-length portraits, their past histories recounted from birth, their separate thoughts, reactions and activities traced conscientiously through all the tangle of events. This leads to a great deal of harking-back at the beginning of the book, and to a scattering of dramatic effect thereafter, so that even the impact of the earthquake itself is dissipated as the author patiently herds his characters one by one through the disaster. In the end, Author Bromfield metes out justice with the precise hand of a Sunday School superintendent distributing awards and censure. Only the faithful nurse, Miss MacDaid. is left holding the bag.

The Author. Most readers were not surprised that Louis Bromfield had once again written a long, thin book—which has nothing in common with E. M. Forster’s great Passage to India except locale—but they were surprised to find it brown-skinned. On the publication of his last novel, The Farm (1933), Ohio-born Author Bromfield, long a Senlis (near Paris) expatriate, firmly announced his determination to return to the U. S., henceforth to devote himself to the American scene. His switch was prompted by a spur-of-the-moment decision to see India first; captivated, he made three subsequent visits, most of them as guest of the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, Bengal ruler whose kingdom supplied much of the local color for The Rams Came. Bromfield still says he intends to settle in the U. S. some day, meantime commutes between Senlis, Switzerland (where he has three children, all girls, at school) and Manhattan. Hard on luggage, he is relatively easy on typewriters, works only two hours a clay, 9:30-11:30 a. m.; thereafter, when gardens are available, gardens.