Too Good to Be True

THE LEGACY (308 pp.)--Nevil Shute--Morrow ($3).

British Author Nevil Shute is a natural-born storyteller with a gift for inventing probable incident and for creating authentic background. Six fast, easy-to-read books (notably The Chequer Board, 1947, and No Highway, 1948) have established him as a middlebrow Graham Greene, an honest trader who sells his reader a story without an ideological headache in it. With his new book, however, Author Shute trifles with reportage and comes a cropper. Traveling in Sumatra in 1949, Shute was the house guest of Mr. & Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck. His hostess had been one of a party of about 80 Dutch women & children taken by the Japanese at Padang in 1942 and thereafter marched round Sumatra for 2% years. Mrs. Geysel was one of fewer than 30 survivors of the 1,200-mile trek. Her story, and Shute's admiration for her courage and resolution, are the basis of the book.

The sad truth is that Mrs. Geysel has become a lot too good to be true during her metamorphosis into The Legacy's heroine, Jean Paget. Jean is a wonderful girl, but she never existed outside a glossy-paper fiction magazine with a woman's angle. While she is in the Japanese bag, an Australian saves her from death. For years she thinks he has died in her place, but after the war, having inherited a sizable legacy, she hears he is alive. Jean goes out to Australia and gets her man. Any ordinary girl would have settled down and lovingly borne him a few nice children, but Jean is a more fearsome natural force. By the time she has done with her husband's district, it is in the grip of an industrial revival, soil conservation is breaking out all over, the cattle trade is expanding, new stores are sprouting like mushrooms. The only thing that saves the book from absurdity is Novelist Shute's lively discernment about people & places. The villagers who shelter Jean in Japanese-occupied Malaya are real farmers in a real village. The London office of Jean's solicitor is perfectly authentic, and in Australia the reader can almost hear her husband's cattle moo. But Jean is as unconvincing as a Horatio Alger hero.

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