Mixed Fiction

THE CYPRESSES BELIEVE IN GOD, by Jose Maria Gironella (2 vols., 1,010 pp.; Knopf; $10), is the first installment of a vastly ambitious novel by a Spaniard who fought on the Franco side in the Spanish civil war and has set out to tell his country's tragic story from the beginning of the republic (1931) to the present. Cypresses covers the first five years of political unrest, ends twelve days after the beginning of civil war. Gironella tries to mirror every segment of Spanish society, from wild-eyed anarchists to stuffy professors, "from the bishop to the bootblack." The novel's hero, if it has one, is Ignacio, ison of a poor but intelligent civil servant. His mother is a devout Catholic, his brother a saintly boy headed for the priesthood. Ignacio's dilemma is that he likes to see things whole, can swallow neither the fiery threats and promises of the anarchists and Communists nor the sterile programs of the conservatives. He hates poverty, but he also hates violence. As he sees the violence building up, he becomes steadily more neutral. Novelist Gironella shares in this neutrality: unlike most books about the Spanish civil war, Cypresses tries to be scrupulously impartial.

The novel's last hundred pages have the dreadful fascination of a bloody documentary as the Communists and anarchists take over and install a reign of terror. Unfortunately, Author Gironella is an uninspired writer who counts heavily on repetition and wearisome detail. Yet even as it stands, Cypresses may easily become a must for those who want to know how the Spanish civil war came about.

THE ACCIDENT, by Dexter Masters (406 pp.; Knopf; $4), tensely tells the story of an atomic scientist who momentarily "lost control" during a tricky Los Alamos experiment and eventually dies of radiation disease.* "What's the dose, Charley?" asks Louis Saxl, lying quietly with his burned arms buried in ice. in preparation for an intended amputation. After two days of calculations, his colleagues have not yet determined whether his dosage is lethal, but Saxl suspects the answer to the question himself. On the third night his white-corpuscle count drops dangerously. He talks incoherently. The following day his fiancee and family file in for farewells. To the end, top scientists, military men and even a Congressman carry on a bitter debate around the bed of the bomb's first peacetime victim. There is a lot of the martyr-toned, bogus moralizing now fashionable among scientists and their hero-worshipers. When Novelist Masters, a former science editor and nephew of Poet Edgar Lee Masters, suggests that postwar America "lost control" of the bomb in the same way that the scientist-hero let his experiment slip, he comes close to losing control of his story. He has, nevertheless, loaded the yarn with authentic inside-Los Alamos excitement and written the most technically knowing A-bomb novel to date.

THE BREAKING WAVE, by Nevil Shute (282 pp.; Morrow; $3.50). Why did Jessie Proctor take a bottlefull of sleeping pills? The suicide of his parents' maid is a mystery that challenges Alan Duncan, just returned from Europe to manage the family's huge sheep ranch near Melbourne, Australia. Thanks to the dead girl's diary, Duncan's sleuthing takes him less than 24 hours, but an almost continuous flashback takes him over years of personal history, etched in the common memories of a whole generation of Britons who fought in World War II. Alan discovers that Jessie Proctor was an alias assumed by Janet Prentice, a World War II WREN in Navy Ordnance whom he had once met as his younger brother's sweetheart. As past becomes present in Alan's probings, the war gives Janet her first whiff of life, and then steadily chokes it out of her. Both the men Janet cares for--Alan's brother and her father--are killed. Just before Dday, Janet mans an ack-ack gun and lucklessly brings down a party of Czechs and Poles fleeing the Nazis in a German plane. After that, she is seized by a plausible, if not entirely convincing, urge for expiation. Despite its sad undertones, The Breaking Wave is a novel in which the characters chin up to life more often than they gloom up over the accidents of fate. A skilled storyteller, Shute makes his combat scenes exciting and his love-in-bloom scenes tender, peppers both with Hitchcocky suspense. In his 18th novel, Nevil Shute, onetime Royal Navy lieutenant-commander, proves again that he is one of the most expert countermen working literature's snack bar.

LAUGH TILL You CRY, by Wolf Mankowitz (127 pp.; Dutton; $2.50), puts a shipwrecked English drummer on a tropical island and leaves him there when he makes the discovery that he never had it so good. When Ronald Rantz comes ashore, he takes with him his salesman's sample case. His stock in trade: exploding cigars, invisible itching powder, the usual assortment of smoking-car killers that are guaranteed to make you "Laugh Till You Cry." The island, a between-trade-routes speck somewhere near the Caribbean, looks like paradise, but the seemingly innocent natives soon prove to be suffering from human nature. They like private property and often marry for wealth or power rather than love. In their own primitive fashion, they are as firmly entered in the 20th century rat race as a Madison Avenue adman. No fool, Salesman Rantz snows the natives under with his bag of jokes--which terrify the islanders. He makes a laughingstock of the chief and moves into his job. By the native code losers in the grab for power are exiled to the other side of the island.

Salesman Rantz soon owns everything, but finds himself utterly alone. Even Kula, the native girl who had fallen into his arms like a ripe mango, walks out on him. By now, Rantz finds that he has outsmarted himself. In his loneliness he rediscovers that over-Donne island truth: no man is an Hand, intire of itselfe. In his new humility he goes to the other side, finds that the powerless, possessionless exiles are living life as it was before the fall. Everything belongs to everybody; greed, hate and fear are gone with the trade winds, and love is as free as coconuts. This is for Rantz. Joyously he explains his bag of tricks--which may or may not symbolize civilization. The natives realize that instead of being dread magic and tools of humiliation, the Rantz line is really for laughs. Versatile Novelist Mankowitz, a scriptwriter, playwright and dealer in Wedgwood, is too soft a man for tough satire, and lets his shrewd observations on the human condition melt into sugary fantasy. In the end Laugh Till You Cry falls flat somewhere between Walter Mitty and Dean Swift, but it is good for an hour of fun and an occasional reflection on the perverseness of civilized life.

* In 1946, Scientist Louis Slotin, 35, of Winnipeg, Canada, dropped a screw driver during a similar experiment, died after eight days. The book is dedicated to his memory and to that of "more than one hundred thousand others."

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