It is time a halt was called to titles containing the words "traitor," "treachery" or "betrayal." Mr. Mortimer's novel is the choice of the Book Society, which shows again how unerring is that awesome body's sense of the contemporary: Like Men Betrayed is nothing if not the English Novel, Model 1953. It is a highly professional piece of work, but its modishness prevents one from taking it very seriously. Its characters, chilled by cold blasts from Greeneland, brace themselves with a little weak Sartre. In the country, the county families run their feckless riding schools while waiting for their tippling wealthy relations to die. In London, the young man, who has never known security, takes to crime, while his father, the rectitudinous solicitor (yes, as a young man he had wanted to be an artist), prepares to take on his son's guilt and its consequences…. In his sourly efficient way [Mr. Mortimer] gives us a brisk and vivid reshuffling of the current cliches of fiction. He writes very well except when his desire for the curt image betrays him into meaninglessness….