Books: Fantastic First

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THE WINGS OF THE MORNING—Edward S. Hyams—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Many a young English novel today is obsessed with the fear of war, Fascism, Communism, Democracy's collapse, neurosis. Allegorical figures of Fascism, Communism, Democracy wrestle semi-essay-istically, through Wellsian plots, with a hero nebulous enough to squeeze at last into some sort of mystical bomb shelter. Such novels seem curiously at odds with the authors' vigorous personal activities—mountain climbing, travel, hiking, sports.

Latest of such stories is The Wings of the Morning, a 500-page fantasy by a 28-year-old Englishman who works for a London printing firm, flies a plane, likes good food and wine, fast horses and cars. His first published novel, The Wings of the Morning, tells of a medical genius who becomes equally famed as a best-selling satirist. When his young wife, a beautiful Communist, is killed in an accident, the doctor retires snarling to a cottage, makes friends with a philosopher-cop, gets mixed up in the strange suicide of an egomaniac artist, who personifies nihilism, Fascism, middle-class decline, spiritual corruption. Next the doctor founds a "lay order for the conservation of liberalism and decency." Also involved are his friend the cop, an undertaker, a journalist, the Spanish Civil War, a miscellaneous assortment of other People and events—Author Hyams evidently being under the impression that the fantastic and the dramatic are synonymous.