["The Caravan Passes"] is a rich and violent book, a book of trenchant ideas, stormy action, and urgently human beings. This is a say that Tabori thinks provocatively, writes strong narrative, and has the indispensable gift which makes a novelist good: everyone on whom his writing touches, be it only for a paragraph, comes to life….

It is a minor failure of the book that [the central] dilemma exists for the reader but not for the doctor. The only appeals which reach Varga are bribe offers by the selfish and the vengeful; the voice of general suffering speaks a language which he does not understand.

Another more substantial failure is one of construction. During half the book we follow Varga, the officials, the neurotic Europeans; their story concluded we go back and follow Marouf and the lesser members of the populace over the same events. There may be...