COUNT TEN

Storm has already been critically acknowledged as an extremely accomplished novelist, and this is his biggest book to date, but I still think that its reception will be greater from the press than the public. This is a long, searching story of a man in quest for a pattern of living, a quest which covers strange scenes and rather strange people. Eric, intent on preserving his independence of thought and spirit, is interned during the war as a pacifist. After the war he leaves a safe but stultifying job to do manual labor as a pile raiser. A labor riot occurs and Eric drifts down to Mexico where he marries an Indian girl. At her death he once again pulls off to accompany a romantic-eccentric wandering in the South Seas. This leads him to a lucrative job, but hating the specious web of capitalistic big business, he resigns once again and goes to live in California, where in marriage to Aleen, he achieves a certain solidarity removed from a rottenly run society. A book which in content is not essentially popular, and Storm's oblique, economic, cryptic manner is an artistic -- rather than a commercial asset. Nonetheless, an interesting book, provocative and pungent, for the discerning.