Divers

RAINBOW FISH--Ralph Bates--Button ($2).

Though many a present-day author incites to political action, few have practised what they preach. One of the few is Andre Malraux (Man's Fate); Ralph Bates is another. Frenchman Malraux served on a revolutionary committee in the abortive Communist rising in Canton (1927), lived to tell the tale. Britisher Bates's first two books (Lean Men, The Olive Fields; were laid in Spain, where last July he joined the Loyalists to fight against Franco. Perhaps because these writers are not simply men of words but of deeds, the stones they write seem as direct as action. Ralph Bates's second novel never mentions Spain's civil war or the state of Europe. It is the tale of how six men found their way down through society to a Greek sponge-divers' island, went the rest of their downward journey together. Freeth was a South of England boy who had run away from home and wandered in some shady places before he murdered a French prostitute in her Marseille hotel. Skinner was a hard-bitten skipper who had wrecked one too many ships for his crooked employers. Legge was a burned-out writer who had taken to drink, to help him forget his responsibility for two women's deaths. Weisendonck, London Jew, was wanted for swindling. The Sicilian police were after Malatesta. O'Phelan had been a member of the Irish Republican Army, among other less respectable things.

The six found themselves in the same sponge-divers' gang. The work was punishing, the pay small, the prospects nil. But some of them still schemed how they could get away, fight their way up from this hopeless bottom they had touched. Freeth was young and smart enough to have done it; Weisendonck and Legge actually had a chance. But nothing could save any of them, not even Skinner's furious courage and skill, when their rusty old boat was caught in the gale that sent them all together on their last dive.

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