Omelet

BREAKFAST WITH THE NIKOLIDES--Rumer Godden--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Rumer Godden is one of the most interesting of bad writers, or else one of the most unsatisfying of good ones. Breakfast With the Nikolides is much sharper and more mature than Gypsy, Gypsy (TIME, Aug. 12, 1940), yet as a whole the book is like an overcomplicated omelet prepared by an amateur chef too late at night for those who must digest it.

The title is a fair sample. The Nikolides, Greeks who live downriver from a village in Bengal, never directly appear in the story. They are significant only because two English children are sent to their home for breakfast while a sick pet is put out of the way. For one of the children, eleven-year-old Emily, the meal is, to be sure, important; it marks "the last hour of her childhood." Yet the title typifies a certain trickiness that runs throughout the story.

It is a good story. The dog was killed too soon, and the children criminally deceived. This brings an intense crisis to 1) the parents, engaged in a cold battle for Emily's affections; 2) the half-caste veterinarian, who killed the dog against his better judgment; 3) a lordly young Brahmin friend of his; 4) Emily, whose ingenious resolve for vengeance lands her high & dry on the lonely edge of maturity; 5) at length, the whole community, in a plausible yet somehow ridiculous finale.

In the course of the telling, Miss Godden gets in some beautiful local color and some sharp child psychologizing. She shows a sensitivity to moods that is almost reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. But there is so much mystification, soft-focus symbolism and feminine theatricality that an almost fine novel becomes too dreamlike and sinister for words. Extreme sensitiveness breeds a type of melodrama, even of ham, all its own.

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