"The Lost Chart" is not Neil M. Gunn's finest hour as a novelist. The plot - a lost naval chart, fifth columnists, in this case, Communists, espionage and impending, possibly nuclear war - always comes across as a 'deus ex machina' on which to hang certain key observations and conversations woven into the book, even the characterization of the conversation holders feels weaker than it ought to be; and, for Gunn traditionally is. I failed in my first and second times of reading it thinking to put it aside as the exception in his oeuvre. It, however, niggled away, and remembering sufficiently where I had broken off the last time, I thought, 'third time lucky'! And, I was! For at the heart of the book are a set of arresting vignettes of thought which are as timely now as when they were penned. The first of which is where too now? The world it appears has not moved on from being a place poised on the edge of destruction trapped betwixt flailing capitalism