Showing the Flag

THE SAND PEBBLES (597 pp.)--Richard McKenna--Harper & Row ($5.95).

"Hello Ship," Jake Holman whispers reverently to the U.S.S. San Pablo the first time he reports aboard. His new Navy messmates fondly call their ship the "Sand Pebble," and come equipped with the kind of melting-pot surnames--like Stawski and Shanahan--preferred in U.S. service epics. The ship is on duty in the exotic China of 1925, when warlords pillaged the land and the Western powers protected their trading rights with garrisons and gunboats.

All this gives promise of, nothing more than a predictable tapestry of hairbreadth hurry and Navy derring-do, suitable for eventual framing in Hollywood. But like many another literary ship before her, the San Pablo offers a readymade image of a larger society. Both as a licensed literary microcosm and a U.S. naval vessel, she soon turns out to be far from regulation.

Pip-Squeak Emblem. Built by the Spanish and captured by Admiral Dewey, the ship looks more like a gingerbread house on a raft than a U.S. gunboat. She does not even have a full U.S. crew. Over the years, Chinese coolies in search of "squeeze" have slowly taken over all the work aboard--first the dirtiest jobs which no American sailor wanted to do, finally everything from cooking and laundry to electrical wiring and engine-room repair. By the time Jake Holman arrives, only the guns are reserved for U.S. control.

Thus manned (and unmanned), the pip-squeak emblem of U.S. power "shows the flag" along the muddy rivers of Hunan province. Her engine is creaky, her biggest weapon is a tiny three-pounder, but her brass is always shined to a fare-thee-well because a dirty ship means losing face with the local warlords. The zealous captain preaches to the crew on the majesty of what they and the ship represent. Without being aware of it themselves, his men are inwardly nourished by faith in their symbolic superiority. Without any particular malice either, they take for granted that the Chinese will never be dangerous--or, for that matter, be capable of learning anything except by the process called "monkey-see, monkey-do."

Engines & Coolies. Chronicling the downfall of the Sand Pebbles, McKenna achieves a rare organic mixture of fast-moving story and far-ranging symbol. Holman proves to be a loner who hates the spit and polish of the Navy and the "game" of putting on a front for the Chinese. He tries to secede from the ship by taking refuge in caring for the one thing he knows and loves--engines. But when he begins to fix the Sand Pebble's decrepit coal-burning monstrosity--and, worse, agonizingly tries to teach a Chinese coolie how steam drives the pistons--he puts the whole ship in an uproar. The Chinese are not supposed to grasp theory. Engine work is coolie labor. The intricate fabric of protective illusion cannot bear the slightest intrusion of reality.

Then Chiang Kai-shek sets off the nationalist revolution. Step by step the ship and her crew are isolated, humiliated by loss of their work coolies, shocked by the knowledge that they are helpless. They degenerate into snarling rival groups, capable of rioting over a few onions, capable of murder.

What McKenna knows of men and ships was learned slowly during the 22 years he spent as a Navy enlisted man, starting on a U.S. gunboat in China. Now retired and (at age 49) a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina (TIME, Nov. 16), he has written about them unpretentiously and with an understanding matched in U.S. fiction only by another ex-Navy enlisted man, Marcus Goodrich, whose 1941 novel Delilah offered extravagant tribute to a four-stack destroyer and her crew.

McKenna's men can be as monstrous as the most misanthropic caricatures. But they are capable of laughter and certain kinds of loyalties and a few delights. As they are, whatever they are, McKenna holds them in a kind of affection. Possibly that is why he permits the San Pablo a final hand-to-hand fight with a blockading fleet of Nationalist junks lashed together on the river. Given the situation in China, it is a ridiculous and even a criminal gesture. But by restoring to the Sand Pebbles the illusion of purpose, it transforms them, once more, into a ship's crew.

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