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...CHEQUER BOARD (380 pp.)-Nevil Shute-Morrow...
...reserve lieutenant commander in the British Navy in World War II, Novelist Nevil Shute 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...
...Author Shute has projected a heavyweight plea in a lightweight novel. The plot is embarrassingly slight: wounded Veteran John Turner, back at his job as a London salesman, is told by his surgeon that he has but a year to live. He is determined, before he dies, to look up three hospital buddies who were kind to him: a British pilot, a British paratrooper, an American Negro G.I. In Burma, he finds the pilot (who had once objected to having the Negro in the same hospital room), happily married to a Burmese girl. The paratrooper (who had beaten a murder...
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...
Said Evan Shute: "There must be failures in any treatment - nothing in medicine can be perfect. But we have not learned of a single failure. The percentage of success is remarkable...