Light Heavyweight

THE CHEQUER BOARD (380 pp.)--Nevil Shute--Morrow ($2.75).

As a reserve lieutenant commander in the British Navy in World War II, Novelist Nevil Shute observed that the behavior of U.S. Negro troops was sometimes more orderly than that of white troops. Later he was assigned to a motor gunboat in Burma, where he was impressed with the intelligence and charm of the Burmese people. By the time he sat down to write The Chequer Board, his sympathy for colored peoples had become an explicit insistence on social equality. Says his white hero, slowly dying of his war wounds: "I had been thinking about these darker-skinned people that I got to know about. . . . You know, there don't seem to be nothing different at all between all of us, only the color of our skin."

Author Shute has projected a heavyweight plea in a lightweight novel. The plot is embarrassingly slight: wounded Veteran John Turner, back at his job as a London salesman, is told by his surgeon that he has but a year to live. He is determined, before he dies, to look up three hospital buddies who were kind to him: a British pilot, a British paratrooper, an American Negro G.I. In Burma, he finds the pilot (who had once objected to having the Negro in the same hospital room), happily married to a Burmese girl. The paratrooper (who had beaten a murder rap on the plea that the Army had taught him to kill), is married and content with his meat-delivery route. The Negro G.I. has gone to England, is married to the English girl his white officers once accused him of trying to rape.

Like most Shute novels, The Chequer Board is readable even when it is incredible. Its chief weakness is that things happen only because Novelist Shute makes them happen, not because character and situation make them inevitable. Few readers will find credible the situation in which a neighbor discusses the son of the Negro G.I. by his English wife: "My dear, I must tell you what the Vicar said about him. ... I asked him to come and see the baby here before the christening because I thought he might not like it about the color. . .. And he said, [the baby] was . .. 'about the color of Jesus Christ.' My dear, wasn't that a terrible thing to say? He's ever such a queer man ... I shouldn't think he'd ever get to be a bishop."

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