Watch

DRUMS -- James Boyd -- Scribner ($2.50). "Watch James Boyd," declared John Galsworthy -- a hortative which, unless it was addressed as a warning to some gentleman who had contemplated inviting Mr. Boyd to dinner, has a decidedly complimentary turn, and is reproduced on the dust-jacket of this 490-page novel of the American Revolution concerning the adventures of John Fraser : how his father was a Tory, his lady a revolutionist ; how he, torn between two personal voices and not particularly concerned with the wider issues of his country's dilemma, went to England, France, Scotland, looking for a fence to sit on ; how he heard men declaim in taverns and ordinaries, breaking their clay pipes with the passion of their rhetoric ; and how, by a somewhat fatuous coincidence, he came at last to march with Greene's army through North Carolina. Mr. Boyd writes the language laboriously and without zest. He is not concerned with unities or nuances. He pays his subject the high honor of regarding it as more important than his treatment. The device of having the hero waver between two camps has enabled him to reveal every eddy and overtone of the abrupt little upheaval by which these colonies obtained their independence.