Reviews of the Week
Books of Escape
ESCAPE is unique among adventures. More purposeful than most of them, it is also like no other in that it cannot be deliberately undertaken, so to speak, from scratch. If you feel an urge to adventure, and especially to write about it at first hand, it is still comparatively easy to explore the Sahara or the stratosphere, or sail half-way round the world on a raft. But escape is an adventure you cannot undertake until someone has first deprived you of liberty. If you try to undertake it completely on your own, as perhaps the French philosopher Lequier did when he plunged out to sea, then you are bound to be something of a fraud—at best a Houdini, at worst an escapist, or perhaps, like Lequier, simply drowned. The classics of escape are written by men put into intolerable positions by no volition of their own but by the malice of enemies, so that the perfect version of it has an additional element of excitement usually found only in the thrillers of fiction ; not only the struggle against overwhelming odds, but the conflict of will between two groups of human beings, each fully aware of the others' intentions, both living in unbearably close intimacy until the struggle breaks out. The field of those qualified to write at first hand of such an experience is already narrowed by the conditions ; the successful are fewer still ; and it may be counted almost an incon- ceivable chance that any of them should have the gift of writing.
Both the present authors have tried before and shown that they can do it. They have now tried to repeat the success, but in strikingly different ways. Mr. Brickhill gives an expanded account of an escape which he has already briefly described, the mass break-out from Stalag Lult Ill in 1943, which ended in the murder of fifty prisoners-of-war on Hitler's express orders. Mr. Williams, writing a retrospective prelude to the events in his famous Wooden Horse, tries his wings in higher altitudes than those of plain adventure. His more practised and confident pen enables him to construct a drama of escape even out of a succession of failures. The point of his book lies not, like Mr. Brickhill's, in the physical mechanism of escape but in the mental reactions of prisoners to their imprison- ment. The typical episode of The Tunnel is the contrast between the attitudes of two prisoners preparing to move from a transit camp to a permanent 011ag—one carrying his luggage in his pockets, the other "staggering along under the burden of an unwieldy bundle wrapped in a blanket." Thus in a few lines Mr. Williams introduces
the black-and-white distinction between the restless spirit whoss only object in life was escape, and the " typical kriegie preparing to settle down." His perception of character is finely sustained throughout the book ; it is this, rather than the external drama of events, that makes it worth reading.
Mr. Brickhill's portraits of character are simpler and more photo- graphic, like the illustrations accompanying his text. Perhaps because he did not himself escape, but only took part in the planning of The Great Escape, his interest is rather in the excitement of what men did than why they did it. Having to deal with some seventy-six protagonists and a large supporting cast, he is unable to bring any of them to life as more than stock characters of adventure, with the curious exception of the enemy ; the German characters are much more clearly realised than the Allied, and it is only when the hunt is turned on the Gestapo in the last chapter, which runs to earth the murderers of the fifty, that Mr. Brickhill's story really springs to life outside the conventional dimensions of a thriller. In all this The Great Escape sharply contrasts with The Tunnel, which has almost no drama and very little action outside the minds of the two or three principals.
No wartime thriller has more successfully explored the motives and emotions of the prisoner-of-war than Mr. Williams in his new book. For once less interested in what was done and how, he has set himself to explain why certain types of men had to escape, and, what is almost as interesting, why others did not. This latter is a question Mr. Brickhill makes no attempt to consider, and that is the measure of the difference between the two books. It shows itself, too, in the margin of sophistication between their two styles. When Mr. Brickhill punctuates a dramatic anecdote with the words: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," the pedestrian misquotation merely halts the narrative with a jerk. When Mr. Williams intrudes into an impressionistic dialogue: "This is the bend round which we twain are met," the crafty parody fits its context as perfectly as the trap-door over his tunnel. Mr. Brickhill will always be an enthralling writer on the technique of escape ; but Mr. Williams is likely to go on being readable on any subject, even when he has
Previous page
