ACTION AT SNAIL’S PACE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33787, 8 March 1975, Page 10

ACTION AT SNAIL’S PACE

The Night is a Child. By Richard Llewellyn. Michael Joseph. 282 pp. N.Z. price $5.70. This stylish but empty book is the fourth of a series of novels by Richard Llewellyn in which the central character is a British industrialist and agent, Edmund Trothe. When the book opens his arch enemies. Lane and Cawle, have gained control of his huge Anglo-Arabian oil company and have blown up his Jamaican estate, Banbury’ Cross, where his wife, daughter, and baby grand-daughter, were living.

the first few chapters are taken up v. ith a bewildering- account of Trothe’s break-down in the face of this tragedy: the rest of the book with his gradual and painful motivated solely

by his consuming desire for revenge against his enemies. In his efforts to trace them Trothe jets across most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, but the book, in contrast to its hero, moves at a snail’s pace with some sophisticated and stylish scene setting, and much elliptical dialogue substituting for the lack of action. This is not ordinary spy fiction but a complicated labyrinth of character and plot; so complicated indeed that Trothe’s confusion about w’ho is on which side will be regarded sympathetically by readers who may suffer in the same way. Trothe finally triumphs by changing his identity and his enemies end w’ith a bang so laconically reported that its impact 13 no than that of a whimper. 4