Weakling at War

AN ACT OF LOVE (577 pp.) -- Ira Wolfert--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

Harry Brunner lived in a circle of fear. He feared life and, when war came, feared death. He trembled before the burdens of love and dreaded the void left by its absence. Watching himself as if he were a diseased stranger, relishing his troubles as if they were sweet delicacies, he could never act simply or spontaneously. Even after he had seen action as a naval flyer in the Pacific, he knew that his real war had to be fought within himself.

This psychological cripple, whom the reader meets after his ship has been sunk and he has drifted on to one of the Solomon Islands, is the hero of War Correspondent Ira Wolfert's intricate second novel.

When he opened his eyes, the sick and half-drowned flyer saw an old woman handing him a gourd of soothing liquid. As he recovered he came to admire the natives' simple, tight-webbed community which, unlike modern civilization, gave each of its members a secure place; yet he also had to admit that this simplified life would soon make him restless. So he left the natives and went to live with Andrew Andersen, a white planter who had remained on the island even after the Japs had set up a garrison on its other side.

Andersen was the kind of man "who always chose that another might die so that he might live." When the Japs came, he cooperated; when Brunner came, he was kind to him. In him, Brunner came to see what he too might become if he stayed on. Andersen had a daughter; she was very beautiful and the next 15 pages are very predictable. When an American advance party hit the island to prepare for an invasion, Brunner joined the troops.

The last third of An Act of Love is a first-rate, exciting war report. Correspondent Wolfert can describe a battle in its coherent entirety while focusing attention on a few men fighting in it. But as a novelist, he cannot bring to life the feelings of men in war with the same vividness that he brings a battle to life. Towards his sad weakling of a hero, whom Wolfert tiresomely philosophizes over, the reader can feel only the sort of minor pity one feels for a sick puppy.

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