Testament

Testament, by David Morrell (Evans, 279 pp., $7.95). Morrell’s first novel, First Blood, was the best American suspense novel of 1972, and perhaps one of the best ever. Testament, his second, shows many of the same strengths. The pace is relentless, the violence stunning, the prose straightforward and crackling. Reuben Bourne, his life destroyed, his family killed one by one, is pursued by a group of vigilantes through mountain country. The externals that have defined his life are stripped away, and, as in First Blood, the hero’s object becomes survival. Unlike the primary characters in First Blood, however, Bourne never quite comes fully alive, in large part because Morrell—an extremely intelligent writer —uses his new novel to test certain psychological concepts, chief among which are theories about the causes and nature of fear. As a result, theme becomes obtrusive, driving a wedge between character and action, and the reader too often finds himself thinking when he should be experiencing—not exactly the effect a novel of suspense should have. Nevertheless, though Testament is flawed, Morrell stands head and shoulders above most of his American contemporaries, and in his subsequent novels—the third is nearly finished—he may well be the writer who finally succeeds in raising the suspense novel to a level of literary respectability long ago realized in England but never quite achieved here. john r. coyne JR.