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DARK STRANGER by John Iggulden

DARK STRANGER

By

Pub Date: Oct. 27th, 1965
Publisher: McGraw-Hill

This is Australian novelist Iggulden's second novel to appear here. His first, The Clouded Sky, was about gliding and was quite excitingly original. This time he has not been very lucky and Dark Stranger has all the earmarks of having gone straight from the typewriter to the printer's. The story concerns a white publicity relations expert and a black lawyer who are washed to sea in a rowboat without oars. They have been working together to help get a Royal commission to look into the case of a black ""abo"" (aborigine) who is about to be hung for rape and murder. While they are at the mercy of the elements and being hounded by sharks, the white man undergoes the standard movie delirium while the black man is revealed as a fairly noble savage. When they finally get to shore, they are still many, many miles from rescue and are in desperate shape. The black man has to decide between striking out for civilization and saving himself or sticking with the white man. At the story's climax they find they have won their case about the Royal commission but that they have compromised the truth about the boy's guilt. There is an awful lot of rhetoric about Morality and Human Rights which could well have been cut.