Private Lives Down Under

THE DESERT IN THE HEART (249 pp.)--Peter Gladwin--Rinehart ($3).

In this first novel, an Australian newspaperman living and working in London hammers home an old truth: people can't help being what they are and suffering the consequences. What keeps Author Peter Gladwin from seeming merely to ring changes on an old cliche is a combination of life and modesty in his writing. The Desert in the Heart does not try for much; it achieves sympathy for its people through the simple device of dealing with them sympathetically.

In the dreary coal-mining town of Gerindery, Australia, it is pretty hard for anyone to get away from himself, let alone from the neighbors. What with the drought and a strike in the mine, life is hard, and bears little promise of getting better. Fanny Warrener is a milliner from Sydney with a good head and heart and a better body. She has left a philandering husband, but in Gerindery she falls in love with Mike Lambert, a newspaperman who takes a drop too much and whose best jobs are all behind him. Fanny and Mike are good people, but their open affair enrages the bluenoses, and makes more than one dissatisfied man hope that Fanny isn't just a one-man woman. Meanwhile, Mike values Fanny, but values his bottle at least as much, his lively cynicism and irresponsibility even more.

In the punishing heat of the rainless Australian summer, no one can escape the vague menace that lies in the coal strike. The men spend their strike pay in the saloons, their families do without, the merchants grumble. Only two men really enjoy the strike: George Morgan, a young miner spurred by idealism and an itch for leadership, and Owner Quint, who also owns just about everything else in Gerindery that pays a profit, including the paper that Mike Lambert runs for him.

What Author Gladwin does is to get small-town lives scraping against each other in a way that leaves skin burns. He does not keep his story moving, his chapters are episodic, and sometimes he forgets his important people while he enjoys an aside with a minor character. But when his characters talk, it is hard not to listen; all the more because their Australian vernacular is lively and unfamiliar. And the chief characters are something more than made-ups whom Author Gladwin pushes about at will. Gladwin is, in fact, that most hopeful and doubtful kind of writer: a promising first novelist.

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