Behind the Barbed Wire

NO TIME TO LOOK BACK (281 pp.)--Leslie Greener--Viking ($3).

In Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov tells a fable of Christ's return to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Unceremoniously thrown into jail, He is told by the Grand Inquisitor that men are not ready for the life of love and that meanwhile His presence can only hinder the business at hand. The saddened Christ takes his departure.

Dostoevsky's fable is the basis of No Time to Look Back, a tense, sincerely earnest and sometimes beautiful novel about British troops in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Written by a 50-year-old South African who was himself a P.W., the book makes a lot of other war novels seem overstuffed and mechanical.

Open the Gates. Suppose a truly Christ-like figure were to appear in a hellish Malayan prison camp such as Panchor. The thought has never for a moment occurred to Chaplain Choyce. He is known to the officers and men as "the Padre with-the Modern Approach." .Bustling with professional cheerfulness, he has a pat formula for every distress and a manly chin-up sermon for every misery, but he is about as spiritual as an auctioneer. And then he meets Andros, a soldier whose inability, or unwillingness, to identify himself is taken by the British medics behind the barbed wire as a sign of malingering. Chaplain Choyce discovers in the swarthy soldier a depth of serenity and compassion that makes his own pride crumble into anxious smithereens.

Among the prisoners, Andros merely exchanges quiet talk. His mystifying power to exalt them (and to check the violence of the Japanese guards) seems to lie less in what he says than in the gentleness with which he says it. Reports spread that he has effected miraculous cures of paralyzed soldiers. To the senior British officer, this seems "queer, unorthodox . . . creepy," but to Padre Choyce it seems evidence of "the hand of God." Profoundly humbled, the chaplain begins to live by Andros' quiet exhortation: "Open the gates of that citadel, your heart, and don't be afraid when men come in."

Vengeance Is Mine. For the padre a test comes soon enough. Another prisoner finds that the Chinese girl with whom he has fallen in love is living near the prison camp. Will Padre Choyce slip through the barbed wire with him and marry him to his girl? A short time before, the chaplain would have been horrified at the risk; now, somewhat to his surprise, he considers it his spiritual duty to go. In the novel's climax, the prisoner's wife has been raped by the Japanese, and he avenges her in a burst of human rage. A little later the other P.W.s notice that Andros has disappeared. So long as men must take vengeance into their own hands, Novelist Greener seems to say, the world is not ready for such as Andros.

No Time to Look Back has some faults as a novel. Andros' story is told with an oracular vagueness, the desperate prisoner's story with an intensity bordering on hysteria. But when he is dealing with Padre Choyce's effort to mediate between the prisoner's frenetic impatience and Andros' more-than-human charity, Author Greener, onetime professional soldier, deck hand, journalist and hobo, reaches the moral profundity of a topflight novelist. Despite its faults, No Time to Look Back, the first of his books published in the U.S., is good enough to make readers eager to see the others.

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