So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of
dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among
his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe
masterpiece--_The Prelude to Adventure_. It starts with a murder. Dune
the silent, the cleverest yet laziest and most snobbish man in his class
at Cambridge, has struck down a red-faced, silly, ignoble, beast of an
undergraduate who has been boasting of his conquest over a poor little
shopgirl. He did not mean to do murder, but there lay the man dead,
where the gray Druids' Wood dripped with rain and gray twilight.
He calmly went back to his rooms and kept silent. What happened is so
filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot
comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story.
And Dune's vision of God, as a great gray spirit standing gigantic there
on the campus, waiting, waiting, is a revelation in spiritual motives.
Dune's love story, too, is fascinating--and his victory.
Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an
atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.
"A powerful novel of Cambridge life, or rather the story of a Cambridge
student with the university sketched in with rapid and sure strokes as a
place through which Dune's tragic and lonely figure moves. The
sentiment is lofty and manly--Hugh Walpole walks with a sure and firm
tread toward a definite goal."--_The Independent_.