Burma Girl A-Waitin'

THE PURPLE PLAIN (308 pp.) -- H. E. Bates--Little, Brown ($2.75).

"Quite a wrap-up," the boy said. "Two kites in one go."

"Careless sod," said Squadron Leader Forrester.

A Mosquito fighter-bomber, landing, had crashed into a parked Dakota, transforming both into a ballooning cloud of orange fire and black smoke. Out of the cloud ran the pilot, streaming flame, to shrivel and die before their eyes. At that moment Forrester realized an important fact. Ever since he had lost his wife in a bomb blast in London he had been trying coldly to get himself killed in combat. Now he knew that he didn't, after all, want to die.

Posted to an airfield on the hot central plain of Burma, Forrester had gone through the motions of living and flying with a sick savagery that made others think he was "around the bend." Then the Senior M.O. had taken him on an outing to a Burmese village. There he had met a pale girl of great beauty who spoke English and wore a blossom in her hair.

With this barefaced situation, English Novelist Bates carries on as if the plot about the beautiful native girl had never been written before. An ex-R.A.F. officer himself, he wrote a homely yarn of flyers in The Cruise of the Breadwinner (TIME, March 10). The Purple Plain is a routine mission of romance and adventure. Flying by dead reckoning, Pilot Bates keeps on a hack's course with the skill of a fair minor novelist until he has deposited his hero quietly in bed with his girl.

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