Contemporary New Zealand, the year 1990. The two islands have been linked by a gigantic fortress of steel. The Government in reinforcing its policy on keeping death off the roads has put forward a united effort to bridge the two islands, from the western tip 40 miles south of Wellington, to a small Marlborough Sounds farming village, to try and save the entire country from dying out.

Instead, a national power failure disaster culminating from the alarmingly popular Aluminium resorts in the south of the south, causes almost a mega-death catastrophy as over a thousand people, including the popular young Rhodesian prime minister, fall into the misty murk of Cook Strait, never to live. Almost Reginald Fruste, but not quite.

Bridge Alarm is at once a terrifying and compositely unified novel. It is frightening in that it re-echoes many of today's political uncertainties, and Knight in his free easy going prose makes a natural bid to be popular with the Country Library Service class of patron and the connoisseur of something just a little different.

This is a novel that will be a trend setter for the young New Zealand novelist; a reminder that the younger generation is not afraid to show their feelings towards their country in sometimes acid prose, yet logically in clear thinkingly natural assumptions.

Bridge Alarm by Francis J. Knight, Whitehall and Fadmen, 1968. $3.75. Reviewed by Ainsley Redpath.