No Shangri-La

HIGH VALLEY (313 pp.)--Charmian Cliff & George Johnsfon--Bobbs-Merrill ($3).

The talkative peddler caused all the trouble when he told Salom, the Chinese youth just coming to manhood, about Tibet's "Valley of the Dreaming Phoenix." "Who lives there? Only nomads, my son. And peace. And happiness."

Young Salom's questions about the valley were tempered with a hard-earned skepticism. He knew Tibet; his father had been killed there. But the persistent peddler's picture of the fabulous valley, "a place where you can belong," made him decide to set out.

Four hard months later, Salom crossed the final range and got his first glimpse of the Valley of the Dreaming Phoenix. Picturesquely, it was all that the old peddler had said it would be, an awesome "spreading bowl of light and color." But peace and happiness were not so evident, and before the brief summer was out, Salom had learned from the valley's dozen herdsmen families a universal truth: jealousy, betrayal and moral corruption haunt even the most isolated of men.

Explains Australian Author George Johnston, who wrote High Valley in collaboration with his wife: "I was the journalist who supplied the substance. She was the artist who supplied the burnish." Journalist Johnston's substance is the old story of the penniless youth who falls in love with the headman's daughter ("She has the eyes of a gazelle, he thought"), only to find that his suit is hopeless be cause she has been betrothed since child hood. To make matters worse, a tithe-collecting lama visits the valley and de mands a night with gazelle-eyed Veshti.

Her father, the headman, is willing to go along with this old unauthorized valley custom, but Salom is not. When the lovers escape together, they find themselves bedded down forever in a blizzard.

The burnish that Co-Author Charmian Clift brings to her husband's moral tale was good enough, despite a tendency to purple prose, to help win High Valley the -L-2,000 first prize in an Australian novel contest in 1948. The book will also gen erally please readers who like Oriental stories to have Oriental endings. Those who prefer Southern California endings should be warned that High Valley is not James Hilton's Shangri-La.

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