Word: chequers
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...Reason: after paying Socialist Britain's income tax, Sherriff reckoned that he would have only $1,400 of his earnings left (TIME, March 27). Last week another British writer announced his intention to strike against the exorbitant tax rates. From his latest book Legacy, Novelist Nevil Shute (Pastoral, Chequer Board) expects to make about ?18,000 ($50,400), but after paying British taxes he will be able to keep only about ?3,000. To save a smitch of his earnings on Legacy and future books, Novelist Shute (real name: Nevil Shute Norway) concluded he simply would have...
British Author Nevil Shute is a natural-born storyteller with a gift for inventing probable incident and for creating authentic background. Six fast, easy-to-read books (notably The Chequer Board, 1947, and No Highway, 1948) have established him as a middlebrow Graham Greene, an honest trader who sells his reader a story without an ideological headache in it. With his new book, however, Author Shute trifles with reportage and comes a cropper. Traveling in Sumatra in 1949, Shute was the house guest of Mr. & Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck. His hostess had been one of a party of about...
...CHEQUER BOARD (380 pp.)-Nevil Shute-Morrow...
...observed that the behavior of U.S. Negro troops was sometimes more orderly than that of white troops. Later he was assigned to a motor gunboat in Burma, where he was impressed with the intelligence and charm of the Burmese people. By the time he sat down to write The Chequer Board, his sympathy for colored peoples had become an explicit insistence on social equality. Says his white hero, slowly dying of his war wounds: "I had been thinking about these darker-skinned people that I got to know about. . . . You know, there don't seem to be nothing different...
Like most Shute novels, The Chequer Board is readable even when it is incredible. Its chief weakness is that things happen only because Novelist Shute makes them happen, not because character and situation make them inevitable. Few readers will find credible the situation in which a neighbor discusses the son of the Negro G.I. by his English wife: "My dear, I must tell you what the Vicar said about him. ... I asked him to come and see the baby here before the christening because I thought he might not like it about the color. . .. And he said, [the baby...