["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 a gain in irony, and it is possible, too, that the author wished by this method to emphasize the great distance between the viewpoints of the handful in command and the multitude commanded. But the method is a synthetic one, weakening the effect of organism. Instead of plot and counterplot building to a double climax in a big book we are presented with two circumstantially connected, slighter books. But that both have strength is proof of Tabori's enormous ability.

Tabori's control of English, a language to which he wasn't bred, is superb. He handles it with the unlabored eloquence and reckless accuracy of a poet….

The breadth and depth of the author's understanding match his ability to express it….

Tabori believes that mass-will moves towards justice. He denies that Western progress has much to offer Arab life. He has a strong sense of the power of the accidental…. He treats sex as a powerful instrument of wounding and healing but not an all-powerful one. He tries to show that "every life that [is] not saintly … is, in fact, criminal." These and a dozen other well-defended concepts may be found in or deduced from "The Caravan Passes."

Of the people writing seriously today George Tabori is very much a man to watch. He's very much a man to read, too.