To say this is to say that René Maran, though himself of Batouala’s race, has learned in Paris to make Parisians understand him and that the fame of his book depends upon his skilful use of a sophisticated idiom. But there is more to be said than that. _Batouala_ is a document as well upon the process by which an inarticulate section of mankind is beginning to be articulate. Out of the heart of a dark continent comes a tongue which uses neither the rant of the imperialist nor the brag of the trader nor the snuffle of the missionary. That tongue is hot with hatred for what Europe has done to Africa through the exercise of a greed which is the more malevolent because it is incompetent. The world of Batouala is a world spoiled by alien hands and laid waste as fever and tribal wars never laid it waste. Back of the quiet accents which M. Maran uses is the impact of a whole race’s wrongs and resentments. And yet those accents are quiet, for the book, though not primitive art, is art of a high order. It is, says M. Maran in his preface, “altogether objective. It makes no attempt to explain: it states.” Being a genuine work of the imagination, _Batouala_, of course, is less impersonal than its author believes it to be; its material is shaped at every point by a hand which, beating with the pulse of Africa, loves these contours and expresses its passion through them. Its passion, however, has been so guided by principle that it is emphasized by reticence much as that reticence is warmed by passion. In the circumstances, a plain story is enough, given, too, merely as a series of etchings from the career of Batouala, and only partly concerned with his relations to the whites. Candid pictures (considerably softened in this translation) of his daily life and final tragedy pass vividly by: all the customs and rites and sounds and stenches of his village, the throbbing of drums, the ferment of sexuality, the conflict of races, the pressure of nature upon man, the irony of primitive plans, the pity of primitive defeat. A great novel? Not quite, because it is febrile and fragmentary. But it has some of the marks of greatness upon it: energy, intensity, vitality. STUPID SCANDAL