Half-Caste

THE DARK RIVER--Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall -- Little, Brown ($2.50).

A mothers' proverb, referring to boys' chores, says that "Two boys are only half a boy." This saying applies also to most literary collaborations, even to those of such individually able collaborators as were Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. To Tahiti-Expatriates Nordhoff & Hall, who in 18 years have collaborated on eight books, it applied least in their H. M. S. Bounty trilogy, where they followed a true story, applies most in The Dark River, where they follow their imaginations, the Satevepost (where this story ran serially) and Hollywood.

The story centres on the relation between whites and natives. In an isolated valley in Tahiti, 16 years before the story opens, a young English widow, mother of a four-year-old son, dies while giving birth to a girl. A native woman bears a still-born child at the same time, steals the white girl, whom she calls Naia, raises her as her own. From England, when Naia is 16, comes her real brother and his friend, tall, grey-eyed Alan Hardie, a promising young scientist, son of a stiff-necked general. Hardened Melodramatists Nordhoff & Hall are careful to keep these complications from turning into a story of incest, end their tale with the marriage of Naia and Alan, their shipwreck on a deserted island, rescue, tragedy.

Although The Dark River has the conventional writing and characterizations of melodramatic fiction and introduces an unusual number of picturesque poses (silhouettes atop sea cliffs, arm-around-tree pensiveness), it still rates above the average South Sea island romance. This may be credited, not to its authentic setting--most popular fiction nowadays has that--but rather to its authors' genuine sympathy for native Tahitians.

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