The Near East

I KNOW of few writers more indefatigable in their preparation than Manuel Komroff. Coronet, his continental two-volume novel published in 1930, he carried in his mind for well over six years, its design firm, intact, its episodes assuming color and content as he read and studied the single epochs. When he came to set it down, his hardest task was one of compression. Two Thieves (Coward-McCann, $2.50), his book of this year, is — within its much briefer compass — the result of just such painstaking forethought. An historical novel, skillful in its detail, sage in its proverbs, ! take it as a happy illustration that hard writing is easy reading.

The story is laid in the Judea of Pontius Pilate, and its chief characters are the two most famed thieves in history—they who hung at Calvary. According to Komroff, the first is Barzor, a well-born Arab of Jerusalem, who had been terribly wronged by Herod; the other Rongus, a young Jew, rescued from n Homan slave driver. These two were prime movers in a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Legions and to proclaim a rightful king in Judea. Their plan, immensely involved, depended as much upon perfect timing as upon the uprising of the populace; when it failed they met the fate of the Greater Messiah.

The novel is most arresting in the terse simplicity with which it resurrects the coloring and movement of the ancient time; I feel that I have really seen the Gates and Temple of Jerusalem and known the brutal power of the Legions. But the characterization I cannot, believe is quite in keeping: here are energy, cunning, and force, but too little of tenderness, passion, or humor, to give life to the page. Most of all do Barzor and Rongus suffer from their plot, which is hectic and always haltincredible.

Christ never appears in the story. There are references to a ‘wild mountain prophet,’ but no more. Yet the reader cannot help thinking of the greater tragedy that is affiliated with this very time and place, a story of unmatched emotion of which this is no more than a side light. The unnamed Presence casts too great a shadow.

From France, and exceptionally translated, comes a novel which invites immediate comparison with Two Thieves. A Night in Kurdistan, by Joan-Kiehard Bloch (Simon and Schuster, $2.50), unrolls a panorama of ancient Anatolia. The author, whose industry ami powers of observation were well expressed in his big family novel ‘ — & Co.,’ has now ‘gone East’ with all the intensity of Flaubert. As in Salammobô, here is passion at its most primitive, pillage and retribution equally ferocious, and cunning which, however intricate, is never unbelievable. These eloments do not go off with the loud bang of melodrama; they have been fused and tempered into a steady glow by the presence of the author, who includes his own philosophy throughout the narrative and by so doing adds force and sophistication to the tale. Here certainly is a book to heat your blood.

There are, to be sure, certain obstacles in the wax of sheer enjoyment. There isa prelude in which Mr. Bloch dedicates himself rather theatrically to the East and which I could do without; there is another passage of artifice in which speech, thoughts, and dreams are interwoven with much less mastery than Mrs. Woolf commands; again, there is in one character, Mirzo, a strain of fanaticism hard to comprehend. Hut these should not block the enjoyment of so good a novel. The story concerns a marauding tribe, the Hekiari, how they descend from the mountains and ravage a Nestorian village and what retribution falls upon two of their number. The narrative itself is real and sweeping, while blended into it are the mysticism, the savageness, and the rich imagery that one expects of ‘ the Continent of Passion.'

EDWARD WEEKS