OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Following the iconoclastic spirit of the age, Mr. Barry Pain has essayed in The Death of Maurice (Skeffington) the revolutionary experiment of a murder mystery tale that does not contain (a) a love interest, (b) a wrongly suspected hero, (c) a baffled inspector, (d) an amateur, but inspired, detective. It would be a grateful task to add that the result proves the superfluity of these time-worn accessories. But the cold fact is that, to me at least, the proof went the other way. From the first I was painfully aware of a lack of snap about the whole business, and I am more than suspicious that the author himself may have shared my unwilling indifference. Maurice was an artistic bachelor, a landowner, a manufacturer of jam, a twin (with a bogie gift of knowing at any moment the relative position of his other half, which might have been worked for far more effect than is actually obtained from it), and a reputation of making enemies. He had also an unusual neighbour, in the person of a young woman whose unconventionality led her to perambulate the common at midnight, playing the first bars of Solveig's Song upon the flute. One night, at the close of the first chapter, a gun was heard. But you are wrong to suppose (however naturally) that the flute-player was the victim. It was Maurice. And of course the problem was, who did it. I have told you my own experience of the working out; nothing written by Mr. Barry Pain can ever be really dull, just as no story starting with a mysterious murder can lack a certain intrigue; but the fact remains that my wish, heroically resisted, to look on to the last chapter was prompted more often by impatience than by any compelling curiosity. Others may be happier.
The author of A Journal of Small Things has done much to make us understand the sufferings of stricken France and the more intimate sorrows of war. Chill Hours (Melrose) deals with that dark period before the end, when, to some, it seemed all but certain that the will to victory must fail. Of the three parts of this gracious little book the first consists of six sketches of life behind the lines, life both gentle and simple, as affected by war. "Odette in Pink Taffeta," an episode of bereavement, is in particular exquisitely visualised. "Their Places" and "The Second Hay" treat, with a quiet intensity of conviction, of the absolutely deadening absorption, by overwork and anxiety, of peasant wives and children left to carry on in the absence of their men. The third part is a series of hospital vignettes. They do not attempt to be too cheery, but they have the stamp of realised truth. "Nostalgia," the second part, is in another mood—recalled memories of the beauties of a loved land and of dear common things affectionately seen. To those who dare look at war with open eyes and who take pleasure in sincere and beautifully-phrased writing I commend Mrs. Helen Mackay's book without reserve.
Somewhere in Christendom (Allen and Unwin) is somewhat embarrassing to a reviewer, for it has the theme of a great book with the manner of a trivial one. It is the history of a very much smaller nation, Ethuria, left despoiled and starving at the end of a nine-years' war, in which its great neighbours have used it as a battle-ground. Revolution begins, but a woman prophet steps in and switches it off in an unusual direction. The Ethurians perfect among themselves that fellowship which is the nice ideal behind many nasty manifestations in the real world, and, when next they are invaded by neighbouring nations anxious to use them as an excuse for belligerency, they resolutely stick to their guns (only the metaphor is most unsuitable), refuse to find any cause of quarrel with their "foreign brothers," and finally persuade them to abandon the ideals of war, so that peace on earth becomes a reality at last. Here is the book's theme; its working out allows for a boxing match between the President of Hygeia and the Foreign Secretary of Tritonia as the minimum of hostilities; a wicked newspaper lord, who pulls strings in both countries, and a faithful butler to the Royal Family, who becomes assistant state nursemaid and cleans silver as a hobby. Though I quite agree with Miss Evelyn Sharp and the Ethurians that it is love that makes the world go round, I am not so sure that either hers or theirs is the best way of advocating their common cause.
You may remember an original and striking book of papers about the theatre under the title of Buzz-Buzz. Its author, James E. Agate, has now followed it with another, called, rather grimly, Responsibility (Richards). You will be absolutely correct in guessing that this is not a treatise on revue, being indeed an autobiographical novel of (I feel bound to add) precisely the same calibre as, in the sister realm of drama, made the name of Manchester at one period a word of awe. Why do these young Mancunians recollect to such stupendous purpose? Here is Mr. Agate, with an introduction of forty-four pages, all about time and infinity, before he can get his protagonist so much as started anywhere at all. It is a little like one of those demon-scenes out of the pantomimes he describes so lovingly—"Do so! May safety and success attend on Crusoe." But of course the subsequent action is more responsible. I imagine Mr. Agate's picture of young-man life in the Manchester of the nineties to be very much like the real thing. Relaxation was not wholly remote from it. Cotton and commandments were broken with equal facility. Also you may be impressed by the number of Germans in it. Finally, after telling us, sometimes engagingly, sometimes verbosely, all he can remember about Lancashire, Mr. Agate brings his hero to Town, levers him along, year after year, and gets (almost on his last page) to his big situation. I won't spoil it. Responsibility, which might better have been called "Garrulity," is a novel containing boredom and charm in about equal proportions; not to mention promise for the days when its author has learned to discipline his too-ready pen.
From the early part of 1915 until the end of 1917 Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon commanded at Dover, and from the preface to The Dover Patrol (Hutchinson) we can gather that he is smarting under a considerable sense of injustice and injury. Of the merits of his case—he frankly describes his dismissal as brutal—I do not pretend to judge, but can safely assume that the other side have something to say for themselves, if they care to. However, you are not to suppose that this is a bitter book. Most generous are the praises which the Admiral bestows upon his subordinates; his venom he reserves for just the chosen few who, no doubt, can bear it. Apart from personal recriminations, of which some of us must be more than tired, these two portly volumes are of real historical value. You will find in them not only a record of actual achievements, often carried out under desperately difficult conditions, but also of projects which for one reason or another were never fulfilled. "Why don't we try to land on the Belgian coast?" was a question our amateur strategists were never weary of asking. Well, here is their answer. Here, too, are countless photographs, charts, plans and diagrams—a really wonderful collection. Even if you are not in the least interested in Sir Reginald's grievances you will find him a writer who has a lot of useful things to say and knows how to say them.