Girl Meets Thahu

RACHEL CADE (320 pp.)--Charles Mercer--Putnam ($3.95).

This is the story of an American missionary nurse's love affair with Africa. Slim, thirtyish Rachel Cade can take sex or leave it alone, but she is not really interested in it. She quits her first post because a married doctor keeps breathing amorously on her neck. At her next post, Dibela, in the Belgian Congo, the resident doctor dies the night she arrives, leaving her the only white within miles. In short order she climbs the sacred Mountains of the Moon and invites a couple of thahus (curses) from the local medicine men. So there she is, alone with surly Bantus not many generations removed from cannibalism. But that is just the way Rachel likes it, for she is a born coper.

She does not stay alone for long, however, because people keep dropping in. First, there is a U.S. doctor named Paul Wilton, the only survivor of a plane crash in the jungle. Since Dibela needs his medical skills, Rachel has a purposeful affair with him, even manages to convince herself that they are in love, and bears his illegitimate child (after he leaves). The next arrival is Caleb Aldrich, a malarial preacher who loves Africa nearly as much as Rachel does, and they both settle down to properly married life among the Bantus--not before hesitant Caleb has been pulled together by Rachel and bagged four lions. There is only one faint dissonance. Rachel muses: "Do I love him or the country more?"

Feature-Writer (A. P.) Charles Mercer wrote his third and best novel after a two-month visit to the Belgian Congo. The book is packed with just the sort of plot that will fill a wide screen (RKO has bought the rights in a quarter-million-dollar deal), and with the mixture of sex and sincerity that appeals to book clubs (it is the Literary Guild choice for October). But the book also has a keenly felt love of place, and reflects deep wonder about the motives of men and women who contrive their own thahus.

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