Cornered Future

FULL CIRCLE--John Collier--Appleton

($2).

Like his compatriot and contemporary, Eric Linklater (TIME, March 27), young English Author John Collier refuses to be pigeonholed just yet. Because his first novel (His Monkey Wife) was an amusing extravaganza readers must not expect his second to be the same kind of thing. Full Circle is a tale of the future (end of the 20th Century), but the future of Collier's story has nothing in common with the mechanized Utopia of H. G. Wells's romances or Aldous Huxley's satire. Some readers may think Full Circle extravagant but few would find it amusing.

Wars, revolutions, pestilence have swept civilization off the planet. Man is once more back to ground-level, back to a new prehistory. Nations have broken up into little clans, huddled together in the ruins of old farms or in what is left of towns. Roads, machinery, guns, conveniences, communications have all vanished, even from the memory of all but the oldest. Most prized possession of the little clan Author Collier focuses on is their stores of barbed wire, relic of the last war, with which they are constantly strengthening and patching their elaborate defenses. The clan, is ruled by a Chief, biggest, bravest and most experienced of the lot. Monogamy is still the rule; there are fewer women than men. The young men are beginning to grumble at the Chief. He lays plans for a raid to get more women. His own prestige demands that he lead the raiders, but real hero of the day is Harry, his brawny young rival. Harry's friends seize the occasion to try to kill the Chief from ambush, finally have to resort to poison. Under Harry's ambitious leadership the tribe is slaved for a bigger & better future, but unfortunately Harry kills his captured bride's brother, just as she is beginning to transfer her stranger's allegiance to him. That changes her love to hate; she escapes and guides her tribe's warriors against Harry's stronghold. The attackers are caught in a trap and massacred; Harry is too late to prevent his still beloved bride from sharing her family's fate.

Whether such scattered, barbarous, mutually hostile little clans will ever succeed in getting together and building a new civilization Author Collier wisely does not even hint. Sufficient for his tale is the evil thereof, sufficient to give many an optimist gritty food for thought.

The Author. In his salad days, not so long ago (he was born in 1901), John Collier was famed in London's artistic Chelsea district for wearing a beret before berets were worn. Literarily as well as sartorially precocious, his youthful lispings appeared in such odd numbers as This Quarter, Paris-published exiles' magazine, and a London broadsheet called The Barricade. His smart anthological edition of John Aubrey, 17th Century scandalmonger (The Scandal & Credulities of John Aubrey), the keenly quiet satire of His Monkey Wife got Author Collier a wider audience than London's Chelsea or Paris's Left Bank. Short, merry, bumpkinesque, John Collier lives in the still undevastated Hampshire countryside, is poetry editor of Viscountess Rhondda's Time & Tide.

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