JOHN HERSEY’S NEW NOVEL

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28128, 17 November 1956, Page 3

JOHN HERSEY’S NEW NOVEL

A TOUCH OF ETERNAL CONFLICT (By S. J. Hari\y)

Every so often a new novel receives almost unanimous critical acclaim in the United States. The most recent is John Hersey’s new book “A Single Pebble” (published in England by Hamish Hamilton). It leaves the reader with the haunting awareness of an individual’s fleeting significance—or insignificance—when measured against the timeliness of the world around hijn. It is beautiful and profound, written with art and emotion.

Hersey’s main protagonist is a river —the Yangtze in China. More explicity, it is the treacherous twohundred mile stretch of the Yangtze between Ichang and Wanhsien—covered with foaming rapids and occasional whirlpools, sometimes as unprepossessing as a calm lake, sometimes surrounded by the high, sheer walls of gorges, sometimes studded with dangerous rocks.

It is along this Water route —a millennium old—that the unnamed narrator travels in the early 1920’5. He is a young American engineer, come to look over prospects for building a dam and changing the nature of the river. He travels upstream on a one-hundred-foot cargo junk, a craft—he notes—well-designed forty centuries ago. The junk is towed against the current by a team of labourers called “trackers”—led by the songs and ancient chants of a muscular head tracker known as Old Pebble.

Old Pebble is a basically simple and spiritual character. As the author describes him: “His life was a towpath; he was hauling himself wearily along it; his head and his heart were his stubborn trackers. He must have been trying his best, I now realise, to free himself from delusion, to struggle to rise above existence and pain, to speak truth, to be pure, to hurt no living thing, to have self control, to have a wakeful mind, and rapturously to contemplate his short and awful life.”

And later the narrator —the young engineer—says of Old Pebble, of the centuries-old towpath sometimes cut directly into the hard face of the gorge walls, of the river itself: “What patience! And what a chasm between such patience and my hasty world!” And thus Hersey draws his conflict —ever so delicately—between what can only be the restlessness and tensions of a modern world and the immutably slow erosion of time itself. It is the river that wins out in the end. We get the impression that the young engineer’s dam might never be built. Old Pebble—the head tracker—loses his life in the river, another pebble, a single one, to fall beneath the ageless waters.

John Hersey writes sparingly with rarely a false word or phrase. If his book—in the all-too-rare classic form of the short novel—has any shortcomings, it is because he has limited himself, perhaps. by length; his characters too often are seen only dimly, as if through a curtain of gauze.

That might have been the way the author wished it. For the river, actually, is his main character. Other writers have successfully taken an unfeeling, unthinking element and made it the hero or villain of the story. The sea, for example, in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea”; the dust bowls in the landscapes of many of John Steinbeck’s stories. We have had, in all countries of the world, authors who have derived their main symbols from mountains and hurricanes, snow avalanches and jungles. And by pitting human beings against these elements, the artist shows his individuals in perspective. It is worth noting that most of John Hersey’s earlier work dealt with the immediacy of modern times. He received praise for his long novel “The Wall” —the story of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Earlier he wrote a human and touching tale of an American soldier in an Italian town —“A Bell for Adano.” His latest book—“A Single Pebble”—may very well be one day the most remembered. For it has the touch of eternal conflict in it.