No Second Spring

NEVER DIES THE DREAM (309 pp.)--Margaret London--Doubleday ($2.75).

In her bestseller, Anna and the King of Siam (TIME, July 10, 1944), Margaret Landon let her bucket down into a deep well of Siamese history and personal experience (she was ten years a missionary in Siam) and drew it up full of a sparkling mixture of Eastern fact & fable. Her new book, Never Dies the Dream, is another bucketful drawn from the same source, but though the mixture is as before, most of the first, fine sparkle has fizzed away.

Never Dies is a sad and solemn novel about India Severn, a spinster U.S. missionary in Siam who cannot rid herself of the conviction that God's work matters more than mission budgets, and who acts accordingly. While her fellow workers trim their efforts to the capacity of the church purse, India packs her mission house with street arabs, a fast-stepping floozy and other unfashionable outcasts. So, while neighboring missions gleam with the spick & span look of good work efficiently done, India's Jasmine Hall assumes more & more the look of a flophouse. When economizing U.S. mission inspectors arrive on a checkup, their budgetary ax falls on Jasmine Hall and India Severn's lifework is destroyed.

Never Dies is loosely knotted together by a narrative that does its best to supply a romantic strand (India harbors a gorgeous American girl who has got herself into hot water by marrying a Siamese prince). But the fruity, feathered hat of glamorous romance is not one that sits comfortably on the head of ex-Missionary Margaret Landon. Her virtues are the warmth of her religious faith and the frankness with which she discusses such delicate matters as jealousy and rivalry among missionaries. The general result is too honest and heartfelt to be scoffed at, but too artless to make a good novel.

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