Pilgrim's Progress

INTERIM--R. C. Hu+cninson--Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

The British artillery sergeant and his squad had got lost on maneuvers. It was the dead of night when they tramped into the muddy, rainswept courtyard of what they thought was an abandoned English country house. But desolate Orchilly House turned out to be crammed to the eaves. The intruding sergeant was met by the politically leftish daughter of the house, Virginia, who had been running the place ever since she ran away from her dull and snobbish husband. In one of the bedrooms lay Virginia's once-beautiful mother--an invalid whose sickness no doctor could diagnose. Home on furlough was son Vaughan, an R.A.F. squadron leader whose bombing forays over Germany had filled him with disgust and disillusionment. Orchilly's permanent guests were a Polish refugee pastrycook with a wife, a child, and a hereditary stomach ailment ("My motter die of vormce").

The one who gently held these assorted characters together was the 64-year-old father, Bernard, unassuming hero of Author Hutchinson's new novel. Forty years as doctor, farmer and deacon in Chinese villages had made Bernard a blend of practical man and religious philosopher. He believed that the Western world could be saved only by accomplishing the spiritual salvation of the East, and after a day of forking dung and tending the cattle he would sit down at the noisy living-room table and calmly work on his translation into Chinese of The Pilgrim's Progress. Or he might hitch up the horse to the ramshackle cart and jolt off over the moors to set a farmer's broken leg. Sundays, he often preached in a neighboring church.

When the sergeant became a regular visitor to Orchilly, he found that Bernard was a tormented man. He could not forgive himself for having left China when the Japanese marched in. He was harrowed by the thought that his wife's mysterious illness was simply a means of preventing him from returning to the squalid Eastern life she detested, and he dreaded the day when he would have to choose between his duty to her and his vocation. And finally he saw that his children, Vaughan and Virginia, were becoming more & more skeptical of his religious teachings.

Author Hutchinson eases the Orchilly family out of their dilemmas with the help of self-sacrifice and a spate of deaths and coincidences. But even readers who respect his serious intent are likely to find Interim disappointing. It is not only cheapened by arty metaphors ("I ceased to pluck at the sleeve of time") and an ornate vocabulary (including "presby-opic," "subfusc," "lincrusta," "curtilage"), but also lacks the dramatic quality of Author Hutchinson's earlier novels (The Unf or gotten Prisoner--TIME, Feb. 26, 1934; Shining Scabbard--TIME, Dec. 28, 1936). Like The Keys of the Kingdom, Interim is a natural for Hollywood--where its spirituality will be melodramatized, its lincrusta made less subfusc.

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