Word: cousin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Other B.C. mainstays are Bill Foley, cousin of Holy Cross's Jack the Shot, and sophomore Jim Carr. The Eagles, for the first time in quite a while, have depth to go with high-quality front-time performance...
Married. David Michael Mountbatten, 41, third Marquess of Milford Haven, cousin of England's royal couple and best man at their 1947 wedding, who once sold electric heaters to earn a living; and Janet Mercedes Bryce, 23, Bermuda socialite and ex-fashion model; he for the second time, she for the first; in a London Presbyterian church. Not present: Boyhood Chum Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth, whose role as the head of the Church of England prevented her attendance at the wedding of a divorced person, but who will send a gift anyway...
Author Boulle served as a Free French agent himself during World War II and spent two years in a Vichy prison after he mistook an enemy for a De Gaulle man. So Boulle knows the background of his latest non-hero, Lieut. Cousin, an intellectual, successful novelist and critic, who has delusions of heroism even as his unit is put to rout by the Germans. Running away, he still sees himself stemming the retreat, and when he reaches England in a small boat, he has no trouble seeing himself as an intelligence man who can confound the enemy. His boss...
...Cousin fails, and at the first threat of torture, he sells out to the Germans. He also kills his accomplice, who survived torture but had the bad luck to witness Cousin's cowardice. Working for the enemy. Cousin can still surround himself with the illusion of righteousness. His now deranged mind pretends that his cowardice was really a means of making himself more useful to France. He ranges from total fear to fantastic visions of capturing Hitler through brilliant trickery. The Germans bully him, despise him, and drive him relentlessly toward deeper betrayals...
...trouble is that Cousin is really too easy a mark for Author Boulle. Like many a modern novelist, he has made the mistake of trying to tell a story while at the same time unraveling a psychological case history. The story is interesting and suspenseful enough. But the psychological explanation of Agent Cousin's case, as offered by the psychiatrist, is altogether too glib: "An intellectual ... I summed him up correctly...