The Road to Hell

THE TRIBE THAT LOST ITS HEAD (598 pp.) -- Nicholas Monsarrat -- S/oane ($4.95).

There are things more cruel than the sea, British Novelist Nicholas Monsarrat has decided. Having established his rank as a topnotch fiction craftsman in The Cruel Sea (1951), Monsarrat has now made a troubled but effective literary landfall. His second big novel tells of a bloody skirmish in a sector of the no man's land that stretches between white and black along the length of Africa.

The setting is the fictional island of Pharamaul, a British protectorate, which recalls Azania, the island invented by Novelist Evelyn Waugh as a basis for his superb and little-remembered tragic farce about Abyssinia, Black Mischief. It also evokes headline-real Bechuanaland, which recently welcomed back chastened Chief Seretse Khama after his six-year exile in London, imposed when Seretse married a white London typist. And finally, it resembles Kenya and its Mau Mau.

New Deal. The Maulas who inhabit Monsarrat's island are a grave, long-winded, humorless people, including urbanized zoot-suiters down at the port and taboo-ridden jungle men up north. The older Maulas are courteous and profoundly conservative--content with the hope that their chief will one day lead them to a seat in the commodious kraal of the British Commonwealth. The chief is 22-year-old Dinamaula; seven years of English schools, an Oxford law degree and the flattering attention of progressive girls in

London have left their mark on him.

Vaguely, he hankers for a New Deal in old Pharamaul.

So, too, do the island's British rulers-industrious, underpaid civil servants dedicated to improving drains and discouraging murder, magic and overgrazing. There is mutual ignorance, as is shown by the case of a resident commissioner who does not catch on to the fact that his devoted servant has been selling the white man's bath water as a fertility charm. But there is also mutual understanding, and a sort of respect between the races.

Shuffle to Savagery. Tragedy begins trivially. A bombinating Fleet Street bounder--Tulbach Browne of the Daily Thresh--has come to report on Pharamaul, and by a familiar "liberal" reversal of traditional loyalties, he sees his own country automatically in the wrong. The truth, as he reports it to his paper, is that gallant young Chief Dinamaula is being frustrated by gin-swilling British officials. As a grand gesture, Reporter Browne provokes Dinamaula into asking for a drink at an all-white hotel. He is refused, and in his humiliation mutters something about his hopes of marrying a white girl. In Pharamaul, that is enough to outrage both white and black. Dinamaula is arrested, and the headless tribe begins to shuffle back to savagery. A terrorist band called the Fish Men takes over, with rape, mutilation, crucifixion and cannibalism.

The British ship in troops and Dinamaula is flown to exile in England. His escort on that melancholy trip is a young British war hero just starting out in the colonial service. As the flight begins, the two young men hate each other, but before they land at London in a blaze of press notoriety, there is something of friendship between the two. The young Briton confides that he is about to be married. "A white girl?" cracks Dinamaula. Both laugh, and in their laughter Author Monsarrat hears hope for the future.

Stinking Fish. The book has many moods, ranging from farce to fury, but its timely main theme is the 20th century's tragicomedy of errors between the West and the colonial peoples--in which the black man's Western education results in anti-Western savagery and the white man's best intentions pave the road to hell in the jungle.

Monsarrat's narrative is as taut as a bush tent in the rainy season. As for his conclusions, he will not please those with spurs to polish or assagais to grind. Blame, he says, lies on both sides of the color bar. Monsarrat has settled for the honest and general indignation of the 'philosophical dictum that a man born into the world with a sense of smell has a duty to cry "stinking fish."

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