THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

This fits in with the Steinbeck, The Moon is Down (published March 6), and should not be dismissed as duplicating the achievement of that book. For this too is a revealing picture of the guerilla movement in Norway, but the movement at the point of explosion, rather than in that waiting period when the psychological warfare was in the making, which Steinbeck has so brilliantly presented. Here we see the revolutionaries at work, the organizers, the leaders, testing and proving their fellows before letting them take their part. We see the leaks, as emotional complications shatter the defenses. There is the woman inn keeper, who has been in a position to divert some of the supplies sent in for the German overlords who occupy her rooms -- and whose oneness of spirit is shaken, momentarily, when her heart is touched by the devotion of a German solider. There is the daughter of the doctor, who betrays her father's devotion by giving herself to a German lad, whose own hope is in a future together in a peaceful German countryside. Conflict in loyalties -- and the winning out of a sacrifice of self to one end, ultimate destruction of the Nazi foe, regardless of the cost. A grand tale, which stands on its own merits, and has the ring of truth.