A WORLD DIVIDED

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 23

A WORLD DIVIDED

A Discerning Traveller’s Observations J “Two Worlds,” by Lester Cohen. (London: Gollancz). Very many people feel impelled to write of their journeyings about the world. For those of them who go to places far from the usual haunts of civilised man the task is easier than that of those who cover ground that has often been covered before and who write of things of which many others have previously written. It is then that originality of thought and a penetrating vision are essential qualities to lift a book above the ordinary level. These qualities are possessed by Mr. Cohen, an American author who visits England and France, travels through Russia to the Crimea, then visits Turkey, Greece, Palestine, India and Japan. And his two worlds are not, as might be expected, the old world and the new world but the world of Capitalism and the world of Communism. Summing up tlie position at the end of the book he says there came to him and his wife the sense that had set out to see the world and had seen two worlds. The more they thought over the matter and the more they talked to people the more they felt that old lines of democration were disappearing and that nations, peoples, philosophies and religions were becoming part of one or other of these two worlds. A gift of stripping a subject of side issues and going straight to the important underlying principal helps Mr. Cohen considerably. His mission is sometimes a “debunking” one and his comments are telling. Yet, although! he has leftist sympathies, he does not hesitate to criticise aspects of the Russian system, for instance. The style of the book is largely conversational in the sense that Mr. Cohen allows the people he meets to do much of the talking and then sets down their words. Here is an incident in Japan.

“And have you noticed your spy?” I said no—then realised that the man in the grey cape was with us, the man who had hovered about at Kobe, the man who was at the palace when we came out. “He'll follow you all through the Empire,” said Pearson. I asked why. "They always do,” he said. “Every foreigner Is followed.”

By this means, as well as by recording his own thoughts, he has contrived to pack into the book a great deal of interesting information. Mr. Cohen’s literary style is one all his own—long sentences of clipped phrases and interpolations, loosely joined together and sometimes transgressing the strict rules of grammar, with repetition of words or phrases for emphasis,. It is a style that can be and is, in this book, often dramatic and very effective, but it tends ultimately to become rather irritating.