FLAME FROM THE ROCK

A rather sentimental love story of wartime China, as the niece of a scholar falls in love with an embittered soldier of the lower class, after he saves her life by a transfusion. The girl is a nurse in the hospital where the youth is a stretcher bearer, waiting with 80 odd men of his regiment, to be reassigned. The ending should seem tragic, but the author -- from Western standards -- seems to handle emotional values shallowly, and to make cardboard figures of his characters. One gets relatively little sense of the war as background; some of the descriptions have an Oriental poetic quality, but on the whole one feels that the author is aping English style -- unsuccessfully.