They’re Using That

Four-Letter Word Again

The fact that the sensitive Australian Customs Department held James Jones latest masterpiece {The Thin Red Line ) for the best part of a year, has given the omnibus-sized novel the cachet that only banning can give. It has also allowed the pub lishers of the British edition to incorporate the “thundering ap plause” of some American critics on the dust-jacket.

BY and large, the American critics found the novel an “in dubitable masterpiece”; a work of “enormous cumulative power”; or one of the “most effective anti-war novels of the American generation”.

It therefore will com© as a shock to many readers that Mastermind Jones can also be pretty boring— and this includes his use of the four letter word, beloved of Lady Chat terley’s gamekeeper, which the characters in The Thin Red Line use ad nauseam and to the exclusion of every other oath or obscenity.

It was, no doubt, That Word that caused the Australian Customs Dept, to temporarily prohibit the entry of the book. Perhaps the department was finally persuaded that anyone who uses it is a potential genius and that the novel should be re leased on the ground that it might be literature. At all events, it was put on general sale in August, with out comment. Those Australians likely to get a kick out of seeing :he word spelled out in clear-type arint may now do so.

In U.S. Army James Jones was serving in the LJS Army at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbour, on December 7, 1941. 3n his experiences there he based From Here to Eternity. Although ae has written two novels since [Some Came Running and The Pis 'ol) his admirers felt that these were nere pot-boilers and, for all prac ical purposes, The Thin Red Line is Doth the sequel to his first best-seller md its literary companion-piece.

From Pearl Harbour, Jones went o Guadalcanal where he was wound ed in 1944. The Thin Red Line also concerns Guadalcanal and is, basic ally, the story of one group, C-for- Company, and the men in t. The action of the story covers he men from the time they are langing off the island in the hold )f a transport waiting to storm the Deach-head and sees them through heir first action.

Jones is a message novelist. Not

for him the Deeds dhat Won the Empire; stark realism in the form of putrifying corpses, uncontrollable bowels, torn-out entrails, mess, muddle and cynicism drip from every page. The author obviously didn’t enjoy his war and he lets none of his characters enjoy theirs either.

The novel made the sort of impact on American critics that All Quiet on the Western Front did on an earlier generation. Whether The Thin Red Line has the same effect on readers that the earlier German anti war novel did, is doubtful. This seems to be a generation inured to futility and the futility of war seems only part of it.

In any event, the ordinary soldier, as portrayed by Jones, is such a lone, lost character the reader is pretty smartly driven to the conclu sion that there might be more signi ficance in his spilling his guts out in some foreign jungle than if he were allowed to drift on to a more orthodox end on Civvy Street.—JT. (THE THIN RED LINE. Published by Collins. 31 /-.)