While Still We Live

WHEN the Hollywood producers film this novel, as they undoubtedly will after their success with the same author’s Above Suspicion and Assignment in Brittany, they will probably start the picture near page 200, for it is there that the story gets under way. Up to that point Miss MacInnes’s narrative does not carry much conviction or real interest, for she is working out an elaborate exposition and a rather unconvincing background of war-torn Poland. But then suddenly she doffs pretentiousness and gets down to the hunter and the hunted, a type of tale which she tells with consummate skill.

Sheila Mathews, an orphaned English girl, finds herself in Poland when the Germans march in. She is deeply, almost mystically, attached to the country, and rather than take the easy road of escape opened to her, she accepts an offer to become part of a Polish underground movement being organized to harass the Germans occupying Poland. Her missions are various and dangerous as she tries to play both ends against the middle. Through her work she becomes involved with the Gestapo, with the destruction of a little village similar to Lidice, and above all with a sort of Polish Robin Hood, Captain Adam Wisniewski, a dashing guerrilla. The excitement is complete with shots and screams in the night, suspected and unsuspected spies, and headlong escapes through menacing forests.

Like a well-dressed bride, Miss MacInnes’s story wears something old and something new-with just enough of the new to keep the reader moving on through a great deal that has become old hat to followers of spy romances. The characters are well known and well worn, the action unashamedly melodramatic. It is a personal story of an individual’s adventures, and it is at its best when it is not making pretenses at representing the indomitable spirit of the Poles. The tragedy of Poland and her people has been so expertly and vividly presented to the world by factual accounts that Miss MacInnes’s somewhat generalized panorama suffers by comparison. But if you accept the novel for what it really is. a romping, melodramatic tale, there can be no quibble about its effectiveness. Little, Brown, $2.75.

ROBERT W. ANDERSON