Father Was Right

BORN 1925 (320 pp.)--Vera Britain --Macmillan ($3.50).

British Vera Brittain is a born tract writer who persists in doing novels. In 1933, she made her reputation with Testament of Youth, a passionate, forthright, nonfictional assessment of the lost generation. Author Brittain has never again written so movingly.

Her latest novel, Born 1925, begins in point of time where Testament left off. Hero Robert Carbury is a veteran of World War I whose sense of guilt (he won the Victoria Cross for killing Germans) leads him to pacificism and the ministry. His actress wife admires Robert but goes on loving her first husband, lost in the war. Their son and daughter, growing up in the foreshadow of a second war, find father's Christlike character dull. Son Adrian joins the army in a rebellious climax to years of boyhood revolt, but at the end, in the ruins of Germany, concludes that his father was right all along.

The conclusion is inevitable since Adrian and the rest are puppets contrived to voice Vera Brittain's newest tract. It is all set down with dogged sincerity and dogged prose.

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