Reading Book

TOWARD THE MORNING (458 pp.) --Hervey Allen--Rinehart ($3).

If a fictional history of the U.S. were ever smelted down from the extant tons of costume novels, some of the better chapters could be taken from Hervey Allen's books. Since he went to Bermuda 21 years ago to research and write Anthony Adverse, Author Allen (who now lives in the U.S.) has gone on plowing the past behind a strong but long-winded team of scholarship and storytelling. Toward the Morning is the third big volume in a pentalogy that began with The Forest and the Fort (TIME, April 5, 1943).

"A reading book," says the author, is "what we all want these days ... a book in which we can lose ourselves . . ." If this is all everybody wants, his new novel provides a decent degree of immersion. The story of a wagon journey across Pennsylvania in 1764, Toward the Morning moves with all the jingle and creak and rich, contemplative leisure of a horse-drawn cavalcade in open country. The reader has all the time in the world to take in everything, and the author gives him everything:

P: A strapping, 6 ft. 4 white hero, brought up by Indians, whose progress toward the niceties of civilization is not enough to keep him from salting away the hand of an enemy as a trophy.

P: A wild Irish heroine, given to visions and shakes, whose history includes girlhood in a Cork bordello where a gelded viscount taught her manners.

P: A mile-by-mile description of the road over the Tuscarora Mountains to Chambersburg and the British military base at Carlisle; a dozen scenes of frontier crowds praying and dancing and singing; a spate of Irish and Scotch dialects; a history of the settlements, Indian wars and politics of western Pennsylvania; a long, rapturous recipe for duck soup.

When the fit is on him, Author Allen writes with some economy and an eye for the telling detail. But in general, he lets his wagon ride cheerfully in all the worn ruts of narrative, less concerned with where he is going than with what can be seen along the way. Stern readers, for whom an adventure story is not enough, may well ask, "Is this trip necessary?" and for them the answer is no; but those who like historical atmosphere laid on thickly and with some skill will find it in Hervey Allen's latest.

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