BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

3.50

THE TROUBLED MIDNIGHT by Rodney Garland Coward-McCann 3.50 THE MISSING MACLEANS by Geoffrey Hoare The Viking Press 3.75 DIPLOMATIC DIVERSIONS by Roger Peyrefitte Vanguard DIPLOMATIC CONCLUSIONS by Roger Peyrefitte Vanguard . . 3.50 In 1951 two British diplomats disappeared; two years later they were followed into limbo by the wife and children of Donald Maclean. All that has appeared since is a growing library: magazine articles, newspaper stories, endless editorials and, more recently, several books. The season's additions are two: Geoffrey Hoare's THE MISSING MACLEANS and a novel by Rodney Garland called THE TROUBLED MIDNIGHT.

The brouhaha that followed the disappearances were legitimate: Donald Maclean had held several positions of considerable and growing authority in the British Foreign Service; Guy Burgess, who vanished at the same time, had shown signs of increasing instability and unreliability to the point of being forced to resign from the same service. Either could have had access to secret information which could do the Western powers damage from a propagandistic if not a military vantage point, and it was fairly apparent from the moment they disappeared that the gentlemen had slipped under or flown over the iron curtain. Mrs. Maclean's disappearance implied that the British were not keeping the watch they should

have been.

It is easy to understand Mrs. Maclean vanishing, with her three children, after her husband. We do not need the letters which Mr. Hoare reprints, to verify the very real feeling she possessed, as much for the idea of a family, per se, as for her husband. But, while this explains Mrs. Maclean it also serves to complicate the mystery, for Mr. Maclean was as dual in his sexual activity as he was in his political life. Presumably he was as much attached to Guy Burgess on the one hand as he was to Melinda on the other.

In reading both books it is interesting to compare the conjectures made by Mr. Hoare and the pseudonymous Rodney Garland; to flavor the speculations of fiction with the awareness of the libel laws all British journalists must have at their finger tips. Both gentlemen write with competence and with that special pleasure that infects all Monday morning quarterbacks; if Mr. Hoare is more successful in the long run than Mr. Garland it is because the limits imposed by reality are capable of more excitement than the leeway of legend; it is the reason reports of true crimes often outsell the mystery novel of the moment. The exigencies of fiction require a climax that is often lacking in life; what is trite in invention may be terrifying in its reality.

THE MISSING MACLEANS summarizes both disappearances, puzzles about the circumstances and reasons and finishes. THE TROUBLED MIDNIGHT runs

one

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