Eleventh-Hour Democrat

THE PROFESSOR--Rex Warner--Knopf ($2.50).

In The Wild Goose Chase, an imaginative first novel which perhaps deserved more readers than it got, Rex Warner wrote a modern allegory combining athletic prose, adventurous satire, thriller action. Less allegorical and more exciting, The Professor comes nearest to an English It Can't Happen Here, skids nearer plausibility than Sinclair Lewis' political goose-bumper.

The Professor is laid in an imaginary small country suggestive of Austria on the eve of Anschluss, Czecho-Slovakia on the eve of Munich. Professor A., greatest living authority on Sophocles, is a democrat who, in order to quell a riot of Fascist and Red students, reminds them that Socrates,

"perhaps the best man who ever lived, voluntarily submitted to death at the hands of an imperfect government rather than save his life by breaking the laws which had been established by consent." Called the same day to the Chancellorship of the Fascist-threatened Republic, he draws up a sound economic program, a speech to men of good will.

What the Professor overlooks is the Fascist army mobilized at the border, the fact that his Cabinet is riddled with Fascists, that his mistress is a Fascist spy. Though he is warned by his son and a mysterious detective, he tolerantly overlooks their youthful extremism. By the time he catches on, the Fascist armies are rolling in and the Professor is in prison, marked for execution "while attempting to escape." In plot, The Professor might be called downright hackneyed, but no anti-fascist novel has contained more skilful individual scenes--the Professor looking over a display of stylish gas masks, listening to soap-boxers in the park, his encounter with an old classmate turned Fascist, his dreams following a narrow escape from assassination, his doting attentions to his Fascist mistress.

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