A FLASK FOR THE JOURNEY

The author of Odd Man Out, which was essentially a man hunt story with philosophical and sociological overlay that gave it greater substance, conveys in this book the fundamental search of man for freedom in the life stories of three chance contacts. Jack Kaspan, an auditor stranded by a General Strike in a client's house, tells of the means by which he learned that freedom lies in thought and solitude, in the spirit rather than in physical surroundings, Jane Gellson who is shackled to the past is haunted by her brief marriage to a young German, Bernard Meddows, who is destined for success in his business, becomes a prisoner to his love for Jane and unable to escape his obsession, suicides. The larger part of the book is Kaspan's story -- when, as a prisoner of the Germans in this war, he learns, through the failures of his attempts to escape into physical freedom, the unlimited freedom of the realms of the mind, as he meets, in his German captors and his fellow prisoners, those who exemplify the many bonds that imprison mankind, as in feigning madness to escape a sentence of death for killing a guard, he is sent to a mental home for prisoners where he is the only sane person. A less prolix book than the previous one, but with the same conscience, concern for the confines of man's thought, mankind's destiny. Not for the casual reader.