Big Churning

SALUTE TO FREEDOM--Eric Lowe--Reynnal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

Reading fat, second-rate novels nowadays is like watching the wake of a ship: they stir up a lot of suds, produce a certain hypnotic effect, and a few hundred yards back, leave no trace at all.

Salute to Freedom churns thus for 615 pages. A life chronicle, it begins in 1902, ends last year. Between those dates Robin Stewart, son of a rich Australian ranchman, is a schoolboy, a university student, a ranch owner (75,000 acres), polo player, soldier, husband of an older woman who nags him and whom he drives insane, father of one illegitimate and two legitimate children, lover of one woman who loves him for himself, another who loves him for herself, another who loves him in spite of herself. A failure as a rancher, he becomes a Sydney intellectual, a magazine writer, a disorganized radical, at last finds the meaning of life as he is led before a firing squad in Spain.

It was Conrad's theory that man's history could be written on a postage stamp--he was born; he suffered; he died." No one is sorry that Conrad did not follow his theory. But such pompous chronicles as Salute to Freedom would lend themselves nicely to such condensation.

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