_(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)_
_Mr. Standfast_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is the third book of the
super-spy trilogy that Colonel JOHN BUCHAN has given us, as a kind of
supplement to his more official record of the War. We have the same
hero, _Hannay_, as in _Greenmantle_ and _The Thirty-Nine Steps_, the
same group of associates, reinforced for purposes of love-interest by
a young and attractive female, and the same arch-Hun, now identified
as the _Graf von Schwabing_. Also the affair pursues much the same
hide-and-seek course that gave the former adventures their
deserved popularity. I entirely decline even to sketch the manifold
vicissitudes of _Hannay_ (now a General), tracking and being tracked,
captive and captor, ranging the habitable and non-habitable globe,
always (with a fine disregard for the requirements of book-making)
convinced that the next chapter will be the last. Three criticisms
I cannot avoid. To begin with, Colonel BUCHAN is really becoming
too lavish with his coincidences. Secondly, I found it odd that the
spy-hunters, after employing so many ruses and so much camouflage that
one might say they almost refused to recognise their own reflections
in a mirror, should proceed to the opposite extreme and arrange all
their plans, with engaging frankness, over the telephone. Finally, the
tale, though full of admirable disconnected moments, does not carry
one along sufficiently quickly. _General Hannay_ was, I thought, too
apt to interpolate lengthy reminiscences of active service, just when
I wanted to get on with the matter in hand. Pace in such affairs is
everything, and my complaint is that, though the hunt had yielded some
capital sport, its end found me with my pulse rather disappointingly
calm.
* * * * *
As was to be expected, one of the signs of the times in literature,
not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude
towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial
make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning
to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose)
useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story
called _The Secret Battle_ (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT,
whose initials are familiar to _Punch_ readers under work of a lighter
texture. This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury
of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a
young man's spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war. There
is no other plot, no side issues, no relief. From the introduction of
_Harry Penrose_, fresh from Oxford, embarking like a gallant gentleman
upon the adventure of arms, to the tragedy that blotted him out of
a scheme that had misused and ruined him, the record moves with a
dreadful singleness of intent. Sometimes, one at least hopes, the
shadows may have been artificially darkened. It seems even to-day
hardly credible that events should conspire to such futility of
error. But as a story with a purpose, not, in spite of the publisher's
description, a novel, _The Secret Battle_ certainly deserves the
epithet "striking." It is a blow from the shoulder.
* * * * *
The worst of quotations is that either their staleness is tedious or
their unfamiliarity irritates. Mr. S.G. TALLENTYRE has at least one,
generally of the latter sort, and oftener half-a-dozen, on every page
of _Love Laughs Last_ (BLACKWOOD), or, at any rate, that is one's
first impression of the book; while the second is that the number of
characters is not much less. It follows that in trying to identify
all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in
the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has
certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will
be kept faithfully at his task--a pleasant one possibly, but just a
thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel.
Apart from all this and an occasional obscure sentence there is
nothing much to grumble at in a story that tells how _David_,
the sailor, unlearned in the ways of ladies, became engaged for
insufficient reasons to one _Theo_, only to fall promptly in love with
another, certainly much nicer, called _Nancy_; and how still a third,
_Sally_, with various other people, intent on rescuing him from
his dilemma, made a most unscrupulous and indeed most improbable
conspiracy against number one, who was unpopular. One can't help
feeling that they were all, including the author, a bit hard on
_Theo_, whose philanthropic notions were really too good for the
amount of sense allotted her to work them out with. Most of the rest
of them would have nothing to do with raising the masses, but, after
the comfortable fashion of early nineteenth-century days, were content
to let well alone at eight shillings a week. Perhaps it was this
restful attitude that decided the publishers to claim for this volume
the distinctive quality of "charm."
* * * * *
After a considerable interval, Mr. ARNOLD LUNN has followed _The
Harrovians_ with another school story, _Loose Ends_ (HUTCHINSON).
This, however, is a tale not so much about boys as about masters,
the real hero being not _Maurice Leigh_ (with whose adventures
school-novelists of an earlier day would solely have concerned
themselves), the pleasantly undistinguished lad who enters Hornborough
in the first chapter and leaves it in the last, but _Quirk_, the young
and energetic master, whose efforts to vitalize the very dry bones
of Hornborough education hardly meet the success that they deserve.
Concerning this I am bound to add that I found some difficulty in
accepting Mr. LUNN'S picture as quite fair to an average public school
in the early twentieth century. That its authorities should have
been so violently perturbed by a proposal to teach SHAKSPEARE
histrionically, or by the spectacle of boys enjoying modern poetry,
surely supposes conditions almost incredibly archaic. This, however,
does nothing to detract from the admirably-drawn figure of _Quirk_
himself, bursting with energy, enthusiasm and intolerance, overcoming
passive resistance on the part of the boys, only to be shipwrecked
upon the cast-iron prejudice of the staff. That his apotheosis should
have been translation to Rugby, where he finds "the beaks much easier
to get on with," perhaps shows that Mr. LUNN does not intend those of
Hornborough as wholly typical of the most abused race in fiction. For
the rest, the boy characters of the book are presented with a quiet
realism very refreshing after some recent "sensational revelations."
Mr. LUNN'S boys, alike in their speech and outlook, are admirably
observed; indeed the persons of the tale struck me throughout as being
better than its rather out-of-date happenings.
* * * * *
My landlady assures me that _His Daughter_ (COLLINS) is a "lovely
story," and I think it only right that Mr. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS should
have the benefit of her criticism, since my own is distinctly less
favourable. Mr. MORRIS showed signs at one time of being able to write
a first-class novel of adventure, but he abandoned this field for a
more lucrative appeal to the Great American Bosom, whose taste, if
I may say so without endangering the League of Nations, is more in
harmony with my landlady's than with mine. His latest hero is one of
those magnificent fellows whom no woman can resist--or so they tell
him. Anyway he is irresistible enough to have two daughters, one born
in lawful wedlock, the other--of whose existence he is unaware for a
long time--in Paris. Which of the daughters is the one referred to in
the title is not clear, nor does it really seem to matter, since one
of them dies, and he undertakes, while in the throes of remorse, not
to make himself known to the other. Meanwhile the War has happened
along and given everyone who needed it an opportunity of redeeming his
Past, and, as the hero is getting old and has had a nasty crash in an
aeroplane, it seems possible that an era of comparative continence has
really set in. At this juncture we part with him--I without a pang; my
landlady, I well know, with a sigh for his lost irresistibility.
* * * * *
_Barry Dunbar_, the heroic padre of Mr. RALPH CONNOR'S story, _The Sky
Pilot of No Man's Land_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), hailed from Canada and
went to France with the Canadians. Endowed with superb physical beauty
and considerable musical gifts he started, you might think, with
fortune in his favour. But at the outset he was a tactless young man
and had a good deal to learn before he was in any way competent to
teach. Mr. RALPH CONNOR has described with skill and great sincerity
the horrors of the War in the earlier days; but for me he has spoilt
both his story and the effect of it by his extreme sentimentality.
He is persistently concerned to raise a lump in my throat. I readily
believe that he was actuated by the highest motive in trying to show
us how responsive the Canadians were when their spiritual needs were
attended to by a man of courage and understanding. But I dislike an
excess of emotional spasms, and in these Mr. CONNOR has indulged so
freely that his book can only be for other tastes than mine.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Castaway_. "HOO DID YE KEN I WAS HERE?"
_Rescuer_. "WIRELESS TELEPHONE--HEARD A VOICE SAYING, 'I'D GIVE TWENTY
POUNDS TO GET OUT OF THIS ROTTEN HOLE.'"
_Castaway_. "WEEL, YER TELEPHONE'S DEFECTIVE. I SAID 'TWENTY
SHILLINGS.'"]