Dream .of Beauty

THE SNOWS OF HELICON--H. M. Tomlinson--Harper ($2.50).

Henry Major Tomlinson's Gallions Reach and All Our Yesterdays got him a reputation for profundity. His publishers describe The Snows of Helicon as "a man's dream of beauty." Author Tomlinson at 60 is still oracular, but perhaps his latest work is better qualified as a rather young man's dream of beauty.

Travers was an architect. He built vulgar edifices for the masses, which made him money and a reputation but somehow did not satisfy him. Travers was also a bit fuzzy. Returning from a trip to the U. S. he is met by his pretty young wife at Liverpool. Travers wanders off to buy a book, becomes innocently involved in a street brawl, is taken in tow by a mysterious florist in the pay of the internationally omnipotent Lord Snarge.

While Mrs. Travers and her husband's traveling companion, Mantell, comb the city for the wandering architect, Travers learns that Lord Snarge is going to build a radio station on a Greek island. He is going to destroy the ruins of an ancient Temple to Apollo in so doing. Offended to the core, romantic Travers and a sailor named Bert, whom he picks up in a dockside restaurant, set out to thwart Snarge.

They go through a revolution looking for Snarge in Paranagua, a Latin-American State. Finally they arrive at the Greek island. Travers cannot persuade the engineers to give up their project, elects to have himself blown up with the temple. Meantime, Mrs. Travers and Mantell have gotten tired looking for Travers, have decided to concentrate their attention on each other. Bert the seaman, it turns out. was the only one who had an inkling of what his dreamy employer was groping for. "You think a man is not quite all there if he puzzles you," he tells the electrician just before the temple goes up. "He can't be right in his head if his notion of things won't fit your tool box. As near as I can see it, he thinks you are crazy. How about that?"

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