THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE

A story told on two levels of perception and the reader- an in some of Shute's other books- is called on to accept a shift of personality, an acutely aware extra sensory perception. He has made it very plausible this time as he tells two stories, — the one of a youngish married pilot, Ronnie, who tells the story; the other of Johnnie Pascoe, an older pilot, who- in his years of retirement- has run a small airfield in Australia. Johnnie, on a mission to take a sick child off a remote beach location, has crashed. Ronnie volunteers to fly a doctor in, and falls on the first two attempts. Exhausted, he goes to Johnnie's cottage to sleep — and becomes, for a period, Johnnie Pascoe, and relives in successive flashes, the whole of his life. There had been a marriage which crashed- when his actress wife went to Hollywood, divorced him, and brought their child up to distrust and blame him. Then, years later, there had been a romance which ended on tragedy. The girl was tied to a madman; when she knew she could not have her freedom, she crashed her own plane. And their child, here and Johnnie's, was supposed to have died. But she hadn't, and how she came on the scene, and the part she played in leaving the story's end with a note of hope, belongs to the story itself. Not literature, this, but good reading, both an romance and adventure. The flying aspects are perhaps the beat part of the book.