Hugh Walpole spent some time as a master at an English provincial
school, and consequently he has been able to put into _The Gods and Mr.
Perrin_ quite all the atmosphere of a school where the system, the
confinement, the routine of petty tasks get on everyone's nerves and
turn a group of human beings into strange hybrids that are at once
machines and animals with raw nerves sticking out all over them.
Whoever has--whether in the confinement of a school or an unhappy office
or a jarring household--been smothered by the atmosphere of some set of
human beings, will find himself in this book, and rejoice with Perrin's
fight to break free.
_The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ finds Mr. Perrin coming back to the
workhouse-like school for boys at the beginning of term-time, determined
to be kind this year. But the drudgery, the smell of cold mutton and
chalk, the endless succession of frightened boys, the smug ironies of
the reverend head-master, get on his nerves, and then the Cat of Cruelty
begins to whisper at his ear and suggest that it would be pleasant to
twist one boy's ear and cuff another.
He bursts out, at last, gloriously, and at a solemn gathering of the
school for the awarding of prizes, tells what he really thinks of the
hypocritical headmaster and the drab futility of the whole school.
Uncompromisingly, unflinchingly, Walpole has painted that school as it
is. His picture should be enough to make any head-master who still
believes in education by repression go off and commit suicide. It
should be enough to make any man who is yearly growing more choked, more
afraid of life, more smothered in a stuffy environment, rebel and fight
his way out of that kingdom of dullness, cost what it may.
But because of that very spirit of revolt, _The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ is
not a drably disagreeable novel which will frighten off soft-minded
readers.
"Marked by technical excellence, insight, imagination, and
beauty--Walpole at his best."--_San Francisco Bulletin_.
"The psychological crisis in the life of a schoolmaster, uncouth,
unhappy and unloved, is keenly analyzed by the hand of a master. The
hysteria that attacks the faculty of a boys' school at examination time
has never been so well described as in the moving chronicle of the
'Battle of the Umbrella' which proves that Mr. Walpole has the crowning
gift of humor."--_The Independent_.