Repeat Performance

TIME AND TIME AGAIN (306 pp.)--James Hilton--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.75).

The hero of this story is a sliver off the old Chip. The rest of the characters are sawdust. But there is every sign that James Hilton, an author who rarely takes any wooden nickels, will do just as well with this book as with its seven sentimental, bestselling predecessors. Hilton's Random Harvest, The Story of Dr. Wassell, So Well Remembered have sold more than a million copies each, and Lost Horizon and Good-Bye, Mr. Chips have each sold more than 3,000,000. Time and Time Again is already on its way into several hundred thousand American bookcases as the September selection of the Literary Guild.

Like Chips, the story opens with the hero well on in years and quietly resigned to his own mediocrity. Charles Anderson has the rank of a first secretary in the British Foreign Service and the fate of an also-ran in life. He is a bit stuffy, oldfashioned, well-liked, fond of making mildly witty remarks and coated with "a thin crust of mannerism." At the beginning of Chapter Two comes the flashback. Charles is seen as a boy, at Brookfield, where his master is the original Mr. Chips, called back for a brief return engagement. Author Hilton leads Charles through the pangs of first love with a girl whose cockney accent is acceptable because of her large violet eyes; on through the placid joys of marriage with a vigorous woman who is killed in the blitz, and the complexities of getting to know his 17-year-old son. In the end, Charles, after a lifetime as a dark horse, is rapidly closing in on an American filly, who is too old for his son but not too young for him.

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