Adventure on the Amazon

RIVER OF THE SUN (444 pp.)--James Ramsey Ullman--Lippincott ($3.50).

Air Force Veteran Mark Allison first saw the jungles of the Amazon when he flew over them as a Pan Am pilot before the war. They fascinated him--and so did a little Brazilian's yarn about an unexplored Amazon valley region which promised gold and probably oil. But soon after he set out with his wife in a private plane to look for the promised land, Pilot Allison crashed and his wife was killed. Shorn of the will to go on as a pilot, Allison settled down in the dreary river town of Manaos, became a hard-drinking Pan Am ticket agent.

Eventually Allison changed his mind, of course. When a big U.S. development company sent an expedition up the Amazon to explore the fabled area, he signed on for the trip. It just happened that Heroine Christine Barna was along, looking for her husband, a lost scientist. River of the Sun is Novelist James Ramsey Ullman's story of their expedition into the jungles of the Amazon.

Broadway to the Alps. The search for the River is not the first trip on the Amazon for Author Ullman, a rangy, weatherbeaten New Yorker who has put in his share of time among high mountains and in far-off jungles. A onetime Broadway producer (Pulitzer Prize-winning Men in White), he left Manhattan in 1936, after a series of flops, and headed straight for South America. Afterwards he wrote a fresh, lively account of his adventures in The Other Side of the Mountain.

Later he turned to mountain-climbing, wrote a book on mountaineering that ranks with the best on the subject. And his first novel, The White Tower, was good enough as straight adventure in the Swiss Alps to become a Book-of-the-Month Club choice in 1945, later a Technicolor thriller. Before setting out to write River, Author Ullman took a refresher trip to South America to make sure of his earlier impressions.

Jungle to Swampland. Such careful preparations are not enough to keep the River flowing smoothly. Though it also is a Book-of-the-Month choice (for January), the story soon turns as turgid as the widest reaches of the Amazon itself: the expedition breaks down, fever rages, the natives want to quit. Scientist Barna is found, but he wants merely to live in peace with the natives so that he may expiate an old sin. Even the cast of characters seems to have escaped from the rolls of an old jungle thriller: a gigantic U.S. Negro, wanted for murder, who has found a dignified life in a country where his color is no handicap; an old white adventurer who has gone native but still clings to his dream of El Dorado; the big-company man of purpose; the noble young savage.

Read as a travel account of the Amazon country, River of the Sun has some sharp, descriptive stretches. The sullen natives, the oppressive jungle and the endless, swollen waters often seem as real as the thick river heat. But as a novel, River loses itself in the swampland long before it reaches the sea.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.