Plato on Tobacco Road

SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (334 pp.)--Edgar Mittelhoelzer--Lippincott($3).

Mabel Harmston differed from other young women in that she was "freckled from throat to navel." Her freckles ranged from "pinpoint dots" to "paw prints," and her kid brother Berton and her younger sister Olivia, who often studied Mabel in the raw, believed that her markings constituted a magic code map.

Such childish notions brought a smile to the lips of the children's father, the Rev. Gerald Harmston, of the Brethren of Christ the Man, as he strolled half-naked down the corridor of his British Guiana vicarage. The good parson loved his children, and though occasionally he cuffed Olivia or floored Berton with a sweep of his arm, he never thought it necessary to put them in chains or poison them--courses he felt obliged to take with his more difficult native parishioners. Discipline, he always said, is "the keynote of our lives." But those who urged him to adopt the more ingenious punishments--such as tying a recalcitrant servant on a red ants' nest--were always sharply rebuked. "Learn not to hate," the parson would say. "Hate eats up the soul."

The Harmston way of life greatly surprises young Gregory Hawke, who comes from Britain to stay with his clerical Uncle Gerald because his nerves have been shattered by war and his wife's suicide. Gregory frets when the malaprop adolescent, Olivia, pries at him with personal questions ("Was your wife a lymphomaniac?"). He shudders at the steady plop-plop of scorpions, centipedes and hairy spiders falling like rain from rafters to floor; he chafes when Ellen, the Indian housemaid, presses "limp against him, her skin roughened with a gooseflesh of ecstasy." Uncle Gerald has to explain that "this environment, coupled with our religion, tends to stimulate our imaginations to unorthodox behavior."

Before long, young Gregory is responding to religion and environment with promising gusto--scaring freckled Mabel out of her wits with an open razor, chuckling over messages scribbled in blood and left on his pillow by precocious Olivia ("My flat chest burns for you"). He learns to agree with his reverend uncle in one of the credos of the Brethren of Christ the Man: "Life is quite pointless" and consequently must be conducted with "just enough reality to keep us fed, sheltered and tolerably entertained, and just not enough fantasy to have us certified insane." Even the idea that fourth-offender criminals must be firmly liquidated strikes Gregory as almost sensible, and he quite sees the point when the parson's wife remarks: "We're making . . . people happy as human beings should be happy--that's our consolation. And when we read Time and the Daily Mirror overseas edition . . . I can assure you, we get even more consolation. England! Look what England has come to!"

When Shadows Move Among Them was published in Britain this spring, the clearing of critical throats could be heard up & down England. Consensus: like nothing else in current fiction. Said the Manchester Guardian, a bit uneasily: "The book has a surface charm of humor and sharp characterization; its inner content is obscure . . ." The Guardian comes pretty close.

Born & bred in British Guiana (he now lives in England), 43-year-old Author Mittelhoelzer seems admirably at home when he is pouring his talent into lurid fantasy and characterization. The disappointment comes when Mittelhoelzer tries to be a Plato as well as a Rabelais. As a literary mixture, ethical utopianism and Tobacco Road are just about as obscure as the paw prints in Mabel's freckle pattern.

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