Shocked Swede

THE OLD MAN'S COMING -- Goesta Gustaf-Janson--Knopf ($2.75).

Bengt Snyder was a tall, serious, good-looking Swedish boy who at 20 decided that it was time for him to take a firm hand in restoring the run-down family estate of Holinge. His widowed mother, Ragnhild, was too gentle and resigned to meet the difficulties of mounting debts and reduced income, the fits of temperament and moodiness in her children. His 30-year-old sister, Marianne, had made a complete wreck of her life. She had studied to be a singer, deliberately botched her first concert to spite her mother and her mother's love. She had rushed off to Norway to rest, rushed back to Holinge pursued by debts and scandals. Talented, bitter, hysterical, she stayed in her room, tormented herself and the family, thought of suicide. The Snyders did not own Holinge, which complicated Bengt's problem. Its owner was a distant relative, an eccentric named Charles-Henri de Grevy, who had fled Sweden 20 years before as a result of shady stock manipulation. So the first shock to ambitious Bengt's resolution came when he learned that his mother had been unlawfully selling old de Grevy's possessions, that his other heirs might prosecute. Nevertheless that glimpse of his mother as a swindler was nothing to the awakening he was to experience in the next few days.

Conscious of his responsibilities, worried about how to meet them, Bengt stumbled on the program of the Swedish fascists, thought his problems were solved. He accepted their slogan: "The watchword of the time is action." He tried to make himself hard, defiant, intolerant, although inwardly he was uncertain and usually felt sorry for people in trouble. When he speculated about the waste and agony in his mother's life he decided that corrupt liberalism was back of it all. He came to believe that sinister international bankers were responsible for his financial difficulties, that these same bankers were fomenting world revolution for their own mysterious ends. When the roof leaked and the rain stained his bedroom ceiling, Bengt thought the stain looked like a mocking, Jewish profile. When his sister went to pieces, called him an affected young prig, he tried to remember to be ruthless, disciplined, to fix his eyes on the day the fascists would take power and all decay and misery would be swept out of Sweden. As he steeled himself for that Herculean task, life at Holinge became such torrential confusion his theories could not explain it. His venomous aunt, de Grevy's sister, appeared. She suspected Bengt's mother of looting the estate. Bengt had to raise money at once. But his only wealthy friend was half-Jewish and Bengt, compromising his convictions in his dire need, found himself trapped in another labyrinth of intrigue.

As a dozen individual dramas reached their climaxes word came to Holinge that the old owner, de Grevy, was returning to claim his own. And as a last turn of the screw Bengt learned that he was de Grevy's son. The wastrels, thieves, slanderers huddled together on the old farm on a stormy Easter to await the old man's vengeance, found his homecoming different from anything they could have anticipated.

The Old Man's Coming is built up with masterly indirection and artifice that create suspense for two-thirds of its 494 pages. Thereafter all readers except those with a taste for mystical literature are likely to find its conclusion regrettable, its coincidences improbable, its moral absurd. Unlike the earthy Scandinavian fiction which usually reaches the U. S., this novel deals with contemporary themes and sophisticated characters, builds up a shuddery, Gothic atmosphere complete with ghosts, premonitions of death, wild and stormy nights among the ruins.

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