Aestive Pretties

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE--Maurice Walsh--Stokes ($2.50). LONDON BRIDGE is FALLING--Philip Lindsay--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Last week some vacationers packed into suitcases the worthy books they had no time to read last winter. But more were content merely to tuck under their arms a book or two of romantic light fiction that would serve to while away a train journey or fill in a rainy day. Of such aestive pretties, The Road to Nowhere and London Bridge is Falling are fair samples.

Donn Byrne died in 1928 but Maurice Walsh carries on in Donn Byrne manner. Author Walsh writes of Ireland, but not the Ireland of Yeats, Synge or Joyce. His Erin is a Ruritania set to music, a light operetta in which broken hearts, murder, the open road, gentlemen disguised as tinkers, and a couple of good rough-&-tumbles lead inevitably to the old sweet finale. The Road to Nowhere's pages are damp with manly sentiment and the hero ("a man amongst men, simple men, kindly men, men who could be terrible, men who used strong language as a matter of course, but always men who could never hide their great hearts") is a little wearing. But the comicalities of Hibernian dialect cover a multitude of insincerities: " 'It is given up to me,' said Jamesy complacently, 'to be the best teller of a ghost story in all Kerry. Paddy Joe Long is good, an' Rogue McCoy, me curate, is damn' good, but give me two pints an' I'll make your eyes crooked an' you tryin' to look through the back of your head.' "

London Bridge is Falling is more pretentious. A romance of 15th Century London, it ranks with such historical efforts as The Fool of Venus (TIME, March 19). Author Lindsay has been more careful to avoid anachronism than unreality, though he has thought it better to tone down the broad King's English of the day. The hero, a grocer's son turned soldier, comes back to his paternal home on London Bridge after a ten-year absence, to find his betrothed wed to an old curmudgeon, to get himself hopelessly entangled with his best friend's fiancee. Luckily for all Jack Cade's rebellion puts a quietus on these amorous monkeyshines, and the story ends in a grand blaze of street-fighting, with London Bridge tottering on its old foundations.

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