Night in Bombay

INDIA fascinates Louis Bromfield, and he has chosen it again as a setting, this time for a novel which could have been placed in almost any locale where good, bad, and indifferent cosmopolitans meet to further their various purposes or to drown in drink or gambling or dubious adventure their lack of purposes. The Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay is the principal scene for this novel; the murky heat of Bombay, the contrasting areas where live the wastrel rich and wretched poor, the background for a first-rate story. Perhaps Mr. Bromfield’s book is a drama expressed in the form of a novel. A sharpness and inevitability in the plot, the reactions of doomed characters, march dramatically before and in this stage setting. The result is a story so vivid and real that it demands respect and compels admiration as a tour de force of dramatic narrative. You will not want to put down this book before you know what happened to Buck and Carol and Bill. So you sit as it in a theatre and wait for a dénouement which you anticipate but cannot exactly foretell. The result is suspense, entertainment, and the pleasing sensation that you have ‘assisted’ at authentic drama, perhaps at melodrama.