Rose in No Man's Land

REVOLUTION AND ROSES (261 pp.)--P. H. Newby--Knopf ($3.50).

P.H. (for Percy Howard) Newby, 39, is a puckish soldier turned professor, proletarian turned sahib. His The Picnic at Sakkara (TIME, Aug. 29, 1955) was a rich and penetrating fantasy of life in the Nile delta in the last hours of King Farouk. In Revolution and Roses he has moved on in time to the period when an Egyptian army clique led by General Naguib and Colonel Nasser turn out Farouk and take on the cumbrous business of governing a country that had "never had any real independence since 525 B.C."

As reconstructed by Newby, onetime English Lit. teacher at Cairo's Fouad I University, Egypt's revolution was merely preposterous. Its romantic absurdity is represented by one Lieut. Mahmoud Yehia, an idealistic young hero of the Palestine war who wants first of all to see his wicked king dethroned and punished, and second to marry an Englishwoman. Nothing will so much prove the glory of the new Egypt and heal the wounds of his former "wog" status as marriage to Elaine Brent, a visiting newshen of the London Sun. Yehia earnestly consults a young Englishman as to the mysterious ceremonials by which English ladies are courted.

"Send flowers!" is the curt advice. He sends a great florid basket full of yellow roses and thereupon becomes involved in a train of farcical events involving a Greek who follows a philosophical system called "Selectivist," "really an anti-system [containing the best points of] democratic, monarchic, ecclesiastic, Communist and fascist [societies]." Before the fun is over, the story introduces such British supporting players as a callow youth who wants to be "worldlywise like Mr. Somerset Maugham," bounding Newspaperman Wyvell Speen, and a goonlike consular official called Waldo Grimbley, who is delighted when Elaine Brent lands in jail, because he thinks her imprisonment may be used as "a pretext for taking over the bloody country again."

Nothing of the sort happens, and Elaine finally leads her Egyptian officer back to London at the end of her typewriter ribbon. Yehia is happy with his revolution (it may be a dictatorship, he concedes, but it is a "dictatorship by Egyptians") and becomes military attache in London, where he and Elaine melt into a clinch as the organ of a nonconformist chapel thunders through the wall of her flat.

It is all funny, but would be a great deal funnier if Newby had made the smile on the face of his souvenir sphinx a little more inscrutable. Missing is the magic touch of the old master, the young Evelyn Waugh, whose clown's bladder was deadly as a blackjack. Newby's hurts no one, not even the Egyptians.

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