Mixed Fiction

THE OTHER PLACE, AND OTHER STORIES OF THE SAME SORT, by J. B. Priestley (265 pp.; Harper; $3). In these nine short stories, Britain's robust, many-sided man of letters takes a series of ordinary Englishmen right out of this world. In one story, an engineer named Harvey Lindfield--lonely, bored and bewildered by the drab meanness of life in a manufacturing town--gingerly walks through a library door into The Other Place. There he basks in sunshine and fellowship among the townspeople with whom he used to be shy and awkward but who are now transformed into his friends. Then his own lustful impatience leads him to open a girl's door too soon, and he finds himself back in his miserable old world. In other fantasies, a movie director and his script-writing wife win back brief happiness in a flying visit to Regency England, a schoolmaster gets a terrifying look at the future, a cabinet minister has the illusion that he is addressing an audience of dead men. Expertly told, these stories stick so sternly to the same supernatural theme as to suggest that the author, who has been writing plays for years about tricks with time ( I Have Been Here Before, Time and the Conways}, would rather like to take his fantasies seriously. The one exception is Uncle Phil on TV, an uproarious account of how the unwanted uncle whose insurance money was spent by his family on a TV set returns to haunt every program they turn on.

A WORLD OF LOVE, by Elizabeth Bowen (224 pp.; Knopt; $3.50), is not a tempest but a great calm in a teapot. In the attic of a ramshackle Irish country house, adrift in the summer doldrums, a beautiful girl finds a batch of old love letters. Their author--a dashing young man, dead these many decades, to whom the girl's mother was once engaged--now comes strangely to life. Around his memory, three women begin to dance slowly, lazily, like tired butterflies: the young girl, who falls in love with the shade she raised; the mother, scatterbrained and scatterhearted, who is shackled to the remembered lover; and the young man's cousin, a great ruin of a woman, who suddenly presents a claim of her own to the dead love. The bond between the two older women, one strangely dominating the other's life, might once have grown into a whole Gothic novel, but no Goth is Author Bowen: her plot twists are in the mind, her castles are moated by irony rather than romance. It is the kind of story where mood is action: each fall of spirits is barometered, each falling flower microscoped. Hovering on the story's edges is a terrifyingly bright child who wants to make a man out of her weakling father and closes in, occasionally, to prick the balloon-souls of her elders. In the end, after the hot letters have rekindled an ashen marriage and warmed the cool young beauty, Author Bowen unconvincingly produces a handsome American deus ex machina--the machina in this case being a plane that carries him abruptly from Colorado to Shannon. Irish-born Novelist Bowen writes beautifully -- sometimes, in fact, so beautifully that it hurts. But she also demonstrates that it takes more than good writing to make a good book.

THE GOODLY SEED, by John Wyllie (218 pp.; Dutton; $3) is an intensely humane novel about character under al most inhuman duress. The action takes place during four days at Christmas 1944, in a fetid Japanese P.W. camp near Singapore. The elderly and beloved British camp commandant is dying of beriberi, and everything turns round that fact. The Japanese chief warder hauls out two capsules of vitamin B1 to keep alive the prisoner at whom he has so often raged but whose authority and advice he cannot do without. The camp doctor decides he must give the medicine to two younger patients instead of his old friend. The medical orderly, who loves the commandant, prays all night for strength to dis obey the doctor and give one of the capsules to the dying leader. British Author John Wyllie, himself a survivor of such a camp, spares the reader none of the horrors of torture, debasement and disease, but writes with deep compassion of the chaplains, lunatics, waifs and informers who fight for rice and grope for truth. The memorable figure of the commandant offers an interesting contrast with an other fictional prison camp commander, the Blimpish Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge Over the River Kwai (TIME, Nov. 1). Where Nicholson believes only in face and the rule book, the commandant in The Goodly Seed believes only in man. When he dies, an atheist, he leaves a kind of confession of faith -- his faith that man, generation after generation, will go on living and defying death. This may not make him an original thinker, but he remains an original, moving, and finely drawn character.

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