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.
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE
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.