Spiritual Dilemma
WOLFE, ANN P.
Spiritual Dilemma A Man and Two Gods. By Jean Morris. Viking. 250 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Ann F- Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" Judged by different standards, a...
...Captain Richard Bering's fatherland, technically at peace with the aggressive country next door, is secretly conducting Army maneuvers near the frontier...
...Reviewed by Ann F- Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" Judged by different standards, a deed can change overnight from immoral to moral...
...Bold in conception and brilliant in performance...
...Miss Morris has infused her spiritual dilemma with a pale irony that shades off into cynicism in the sticky heat of politics and public opinion...
...He is tried for murder and, mainly because national security requires suppression of the truth about the maneuvers, condemned to death...
...A Man and Two Gods translates its abstract Aeschylean theme into extraordinarily vivid narrative...
...Richard loses his fiance?, his liberty, his honor and...
...The unhappy and bewildered man refuses a decoration, deserts from the Army and suffers the wartime fate of a deserter...
...The Orestean protagonist of this memorable first novel is such a man...
...Ordered to prevent "at all costs" the escape of a spy, the kindly Richard reluctantly shoots to kill...
...He had once asked his fiance?: "'If you were to find that [the moral law] is an incompetent bit of work, would your life seem to be worth much more ordering...
...In the variable climate of national opinion, a man of integrity can be a murderer one day and a hero the next...
...Rightly or wrongly, Richard believes that the moral law has failed him...
...The only character whose credibility is weak is Richard's literal-minded fiance...
...Her characters and their unidentifiable Central European country are at one with times like ours harassed by war and threats of war...
...It may well be another of Miss Morris's subtle touches to have her warm-hearted Orestes fall in love with an insensitive pedant...
...In his search for the meaning of justice...
...indeed, himself...
...He is freed and acclaimed a national hero...
...While Richard is in prison awaiting execution, war breaks out and the circumstances surrounding the spy's death are made public...
...The young English author has developed both the spiritual and the social tragedy that ensues when her tolerant, good-natured Orestes is whipsawed between Apollo and the Furies...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 21
