Guilt-Edged Confusion

A CORNER OF THE WORLD (246 pp.)-- Robert Shaplen--Knopf ($2.75).

Robert Shaplen's book of short stories, A Corner of the World, has the topical interest of current news dispatches from Asia. Only the first story has a China setting (Calcutta, Saigon, Manila and Macao are backdrops for the others), but all of them have a common theme: the tragedy of a billion people caught in the tidal wave of change sweeping the Far East. Complementing this theme is the guilt-edged confusion with which Shaplen's white men duck the vast problem instead of facing it.

Newsman Shaplen spent 3 1/2 years in Asia himself, and he has tried to translate its political conflicts into fiction. This leads him sometimes into story trouble; yet his people are no puppets, and his firm narrative skill makes what happens to them seem not only credible but inevitable.

Waiting for the Mob. In the first story, Young Man With A Future, a discharged army sergeant, a simple, decent young engineer, comes to Shanghai from Tokyo, where a buddy had already given him a discreet but troubling shot of Communist propaganda. In a rush of guilt, he concludes that the U.S. is on the wrong side, that the enemies of Chiang Kai-shek ("It is not so important whether we are Communists or not") are the hope of China. He flirts with the idea of helping them, but he is too confused to make up his mind. Even his adventures with a refugee Russian girl and with his boss's wife have a nightmare quality of distracted escape. In the end he does escape, from China and from himself, heads back to the U.S. with the refugee tart, unsettled and despairing.

In Calcutta (A Wind Is Rising), a U.S. newspaperman is tormented by the same white man's burden of guilt that weighs down all Shaplen's central characters. Archer Grayson watches an outbreak of Hindu-Moslem rioting and knows, "with a terrified shame, that he had been waiting for this to happen." When Archer gets in the way of a murderous mob, his death is a kind of anguished moral suicide. Author Shaplen as much as tells the readers: hate and violence anywhere are the concern of all decent men; they can be observed with indifference only at the cost of moral health.

Murder for the Doctor. As a result of such indifference, moral disintegration overwhelms a French civil servant in Saigon, overtakes a black-marketeering colonel in Manila. But it is in the title story that Shaplen does his most explicit preaching. True to pattern, U.S. Army 1st Lieut. Robert Gordon is a man of good will and hazy intention when he gets to Macao on leave. He and a German Jewish refugee doctor help a striking native laborer who has been injured; for this, the doctor is murdered by local reactionaries, and the police are blandly indifferent. Lieut. Gordon leaves on the next steamer for Hong Kong, but at least he has decided which side he is on: when the British skipper invites him to the bridge, Gordon chooses to remain with the huddled natives below.

The only story in the book that fails to come off, this one becomes a maudlin sermon, with the fuzzy moral that the Westerner should be on the side of the natives--whatever that is. Thus, better than any of the others, it makes plain what kind of blinkers Robert Shaplen's characters seem to wear. They are quite upset about what the Western impact may have done or failed to do to Asia but their reactions are impractical and confused and in some cases defy analysis. If Asia itself has anything to worry about after the Western rascals and mixed-up men of good will are kicked out, his heroes haven't figured it out yet.

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