Winter Never Comes

TOM BARBER (572 pp.)--Forrest Reid --Pantheon ($5).

"Can't you see I'm going to the Rectory?" Tom asked Barker impatiently. But stubborn Barker "again mentioned the river." "No," said Tom firmly. "Anyhow, what would we do?" "Fish for stones," answered Barker. "Yes, you'd fish for them," Tom retorted, "and I'd sit on the bank and get splashed . . -"

Barker stopped arguing. He came of intelligent stock (Old English sheepdog) but had a one-track mind. He was not as sharp, for instance, as Squeaker, who could discuss philology and human nature. But Squeaker was a rat, which makes a big difference.

Not all the animals in Forrest Reid's books talk like Barker and Squeaker. Unlike their counterparts in The Wind in the Willows, they must have a human being around to put words into their mouths. This human being must be young, honest and gifted with an extra sense, like little Tom Barber. He must see the world as Tom sees it--as a place where magic abounds.

Every Boy's Life. Forrest Reid, maker of this strange world, was an Ulsterman who began life as a tea-merchant's clerk and ended up a part-time writer living alone with his dogs in Belfast, playing bridge and croquet. When he died at 70, in 1947, he left behind a handful of novels and about a roomful of ardent admirers. One was Novelist E. M. Forster, who now introduces the Tom Barber trilogy of novels to U.S. readers. Reid's work, he concedes, has "puerilities and longueurs." But it is the work of "an extremely serious writer."

Reid wrote his trilogy backwards, beginning with Tom Barber aged 15, ending with him at eleven. He spread the work over a period of 14 years, by the end of which his prose had grown firmer. The result is that author and hero steadily mature in opposite directions. Equally upsetting is the fact that Reid did not bother to fit his three parts together very neatly. Tom enjoys two parents and a granny in the first two volumes and becomes an abrupt orphan in the third. To lose one parent, as Lady Bracknell suggests in The Importance of Being Earnest, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness.

But at its best, Tom Barber is very good indeed--particularly in its down-to-earth descriptions of the things that loom large in every boy's life--home, parents, friends, hobbies, animals, books.

The Sleepwalker. Author Reid doted on boyhood's weirder aspects--its imaginativeness, its crazy-paved fantasies. Tom, for instance, is a sleepwalker. His "walks" carry him in and out of time itself. He goes back to medieval days and alchemy. He goes back to ancient Greece, back to the Garden of Eden itself. "Well, Adam," says the serpent, "so you've come back at last . . ." But he has not brought any Eve with him--in fact, Eve is conspicuously absent from most of the trilogy.

Guardian angels, limbs of Satan, magicians and apparitions weave in and out of the story disguised as youths, cats, snakes, paper cutouts. Day follows day in perpetual warmth--winter never comes in Reid's books--and Tom's pursuit of his dreams is deftly mixed with his everyday pursuit of such things as candy and pocket money.

Tom Barber stands at the opposite pole from Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield, and it may strike some people as more precious than priceless. But the reader can justly tell Author Reid, in the words of Squeaker, the learned rat: "It's universally granted that you're a most agreeable little boy--much above the average."

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