Kicks and Cuffs

THE CHRONICLE OF AARON KANE--Frederick Wight--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Aaron Kane was born on an island off Shelter Point, Cape Cod, a well-meaning, red-headed boy who grew up in the great days of clipper ships, was apprenticed to a sailmaker, ran away to sea, was shanghaied in Edinburgh, kicked and cuffed as a cabin boy back and forth across the Atlantic. He survived, studied navigation, became a mate and did a little kicking and cuffing on his own, got mixed up with rebels in Genoa and, under the spell of a revolutionary temptress, ran arms for Naples until he learned that his captain had also been swayed by the same charmer and in the same fashion as himself. A captain at 21, he drove his Silver Racer on record runs to China, married a lovely, shrewd little French-Canadian girl, was not unfaithful to her except with native women, piled up a fortune of $35,000. During the Civil War the raiding Alabama destroyed his ship. He enlisted in the Union Army, took his son on a voyage running Chinese to Cuba after the War, fought storms, lost his boy when a plague struck his cargo, returned to the Cape to find that his wife had run off with his wealth.

Except for the wooden character of its central figure, The Chronicle of Aaron Kane contains all the ingredients of a racy historical romance. The work of a portrait painter whose first novel, South, was published last year, it is illustrated with fine handsome color reproductions of Frederick Wight's Cape Cod portraits, runs to 559 well-filled pages. But for readers these graces will not compensate for the lack of any human rattle and recklessness in hard-pressed Aaron Kane. Heroes and heroines of historical romance may be as incredible as Anthony Adverse or as absurd as Scarlett O'Hara, but they make good reading so long as they move fast, if it be only from one improbability to the next. A true romantic hero in all respects but this, Aaron Kane suffers from a lack of buoyancy, lands in one romantic situation after another but remains in it, paralyzed and pensive, like an actor who has missed his cue.

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