The White Cliff

With power and emotion, Edward Schwartz gives the readers in The White Cliff the impassioned story of a broken friendship of two men—a writer, Martin Bell, and a scientist, Harold Flint. They are both trapped by their own contradictions: ambition and fear, desire and obligation, self-confirmation and responsibility.

Woven in a tapestry of inner voices of his heroes, Schwartz takes us from a movie-studio to a scientific laboratory; from a hospital’s OR to the International symposium; from the church to the KGB office in Russia. Among personages, whose lives are being entwined into fates of two main protagonists, there are the following: Dr. Ann Bell, Martin’s wife, who tries to reshape her life beyond the family triangular; Bill Acheson, Martin’s friend and a movie director, who tries to perforate Martin’s screenplay-confession into a piece of art; Margaret Dixon, Ann’s sister and a talented journalist who begins to realize that articles of faith that have shaped her life, are far too simple; Dr. Joe Smith, a gifted scientist who has given up the battle with morality, and does not stop even in treason to satisfy his desires. All these personages, and many others, create a colorful pattern in the kaleidoscope of human life, where and the world of science, and the world of literature are only two colorful stones among myriads others.