LAND OF THE LIVING
By
The Caribbean island Cayana (and an occasional character) which this Jamaican writer used in The Eye of the Storm (Little, Brown-1958) and Autumn Equinox (Vanguard 1961) is once again as interesting a part of this new book as the story it has to tell. Here in the bright glaze of the sea and the sun, it offers a refuge from the world and its small community, black, white and off white, has a protected easy-going existence. While this is soothing to Stefan Mahler, a young German scientist, deadened by the Nazi experience, it is two women and one man who bring him back to the business of living: Bernice, a self-effacing, compassionate native woman who ""prepares"" him for the ""demands of love""; her father, a visionary with an impossible dream of freedom; and Joan, also the victim of her past- a bad marriage, and it is Mahler's involvement with all three which bring about his release and resurrection... Hearne is an intense, sensuous and often arresting writer-qualities not to be minimized although the somewhat irregular situations with which he deals will exclude and possibly offend the common reader.