THE QUEST

It is hard to accept this primarily as a somewhat different sort of travel book in which the reader is taken into contact with those experiences in discovering the real Java, the real Japan, the real China for which Bodley was looking. And yet it is almost wholly that -- and not the spiritual quest one expects from the author of The Messenger and Wind in the Sahara. That spiritual seeking is perhaps what provides the impetus to the other search; the need for quietness is always there. Whether in Java, on a rubber plantation, or in Japan, where intimacy is impossible, or in the country club atmosphere of Tientsin or among the giddy diplomats of Peking, he is seeking always the man of kindred spirit who can take him into the jungles of Java, the countryside of Japan, the uplands of Korea, the backgrounds of Manchuria. Much of interest here- though the period is ten years before Pearl Harbor.