The Timber Beast

ARCHIE BINNS is a craftsman of long experience. From the opening page of his latest book the reader has a pleasant feeling of confidence that the performance is going off without a hitch. Hollywood scenario writers would be out of their jobs if every novelist composed his work with so unerring an eye for pace, characterization, dialogue, and other apparatus of the profession. Add the salt of social consciousness and you have the formula complete of a sure-fire hit.

The biggest character to emerge from the book is Charley Dow, the logging operator who is a throwback to America’s day of the most rugged individualism. Mr. Binns admires nothing about him (certainly not his attitude toward labor) except his tremendous energy and implacable determination. The contrast between the brutally direct industrialist Dow and the sly, cruel banker Martin Darling is all in favor of Charley.

Around the central figure of Dow and the drama of his business, a number of other situations revolve. There is the continually disturbing problem of his second wife, who has married him for money and is really in love with his younger son. There is the drama of Dow’s two boys, fine material potentially but a disappointment to his expectations that they might take over his business after he is gone. Their more sensitive natures are repelled by the hardness which for a long time they think is inseparable from the position of boss.

These varying strands are combined into a skillful pattern. Mr. Binns leads the reader through this pattern with the smoothness of a well-schooled dancer, and with hardly more visible effort. Scribner, $2.75.

MILTON HINDUS