Books: Grand Banks Romance

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WHITE SAILS CROWDING — Edmund Gilligan—Scribner ($2.50).

Edmund Gilligan's Boundary Against Night (1938) was an ambitious, untidy, talented novel about the Boston Police Strike, included two Bannon brothers among its characters. White Sails Crowding is told by an earlier Bannon. No less high-blooded but tidier, it is a deliberately old-fashioned story of romantic adventure along the Grand Banks.

Young Sebastian Bannon, who likes the sea better than Harvard Law School, ships aboard the Gloucester halibut-trawler Susan Dillon for the winter voyage, greenest of a crew of unanimous goldenhearts. Of sailing, the weathers of the winter sea, the fishing itself, physical action and hardship, he gives a rimy, brilliant account. In the best pages of the book Sebastian, lost at sea, rows his dead dory-mate 100 miles to land, his hands frozen to the oars. He and his rescuer, a young woman, are marooned on (and rescued from) a somewhat Melvilleian iceberg which mystically wanders in & out of the tale.

Sebastian speaks his piece in a vivid, gifted, rather artificial language, like a Celtic rhapsodist. Sample:

"Before me, filling the East and the South of East, there lay a latitude of fog, a world of it, and out of the expanse of vapor there shone a glare this side of the sun, now rising in obscurity; and from the region of this singular light came the crying of the waters."