OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Although Madeline of the Desert (Unwin) is published in the First Novel series, it by no means follows that Mr. Arthur Weigall can be considered a beginner in authorship, his various activities already including some volumes on Egyptology that have made for him a wide circle of appreciative readers. You will therefore be correct in guessing that the Desert of the title is Egyptian; also that the story is one in which the setting and the local colour are treated with expert knowledge and an infectious enthusiasm. Of Madeline herself I should say at once that nothing in her life, as shown here, became her like the beginning of it. Her entrance into the tale, arriving out of the desert to consult the recluse, Father Gregory, whose nephew she afterwards marries, does very strikingly achieve an effect of personality. Madeline was a product of Port Said and, when we first meet her, an adventuress of international reputation, or lack of it. Then Robin rescues, marries and educates her. It was the last process that started the trouble. Madeline took to education more readily than a duck to water; and the worst of it was that she was by no means willing to keep the results and her conclusions therefrom to herself; indeed she developed the lecturing habit to an extent that almost (but not quite) ruined her charm. Mr. Weigall is so obviously sincere in all this that, though I cannot exonerate him from a charge of using Madeline as the mouthpiece of his own sociological and religious views, I must acknowledge his good intentions, while deploring what seems to me an artistic error. But, all said, the book is very far from being ordinary; its quality in the portrayal both of place and character is of the richest promise for future stories, in which I hope the author will give us more pictures of the land he understands so well.
I certainly admit that the publishers of The Strangeness of Noel Carton (Jenkins) have every justification for speaking of it as "a new note in a novel." Indeed that clever writer, Mr. William Caine, has here sounded as new, original and (for all its surface humour) horrible a note as any I have heard in fiction for some time. My trouble is that I can hardly indicate it without giving away the whole business. Very briefly the tale is of one Noel Carton, who has married beneath him for not quite enough money to gild a detestable union, and, being an unstable egoist and waster, presently seeks consolation (and pocket money) by writing a novel founded in part on his own position. One may note in passing that Mr. Caine seems to have but a modest idea of the mental equipment required for such a task. Still I suppose he knows, and anyway that isn't the point. The point is that, once Noel has got himself properly projected into his novel, all sorts of the queerest and most bogie coincidences begin to occur. Again to quote the puff preliminary, "as the book develops the reader has a suspicion which becomes almost a certainty, until the great and astounding climax is reached;" concerning which you may justly remark that no reader with a certainty would regard its verification as "astounding." But this takes nothing from the craft with which, on looking back, you see the climax to have been prepared. I could hardly call the tale altogether pleasant, but it is undeniably new and vastly original.
The good Sioux glories in his scalps, and Mr. Isaac F. Marcosson, of Louisville, must surely be the Great Chief of interviewers. Interviewing, he tells us, is, after all, only a form of reporting, and so are history, poetry and romance. What, he asks, were Mommsen and Gibbon, Wordsworth and Keats but reporters, and I can only answer, What indeed? To have been found worthy of tonsure by Mr. Marcosson it is necessary to be very eminent, and to win his highest praise it is essential also to be a good "imparter," though he has a kind of sneaking admiration for the paleface who insists on handing him a written statement and declines to speak. Such a one was Sir Edward Carson. Hanging to Mr. Marcosson's girdle are the chevelures of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Haig, Marshal Foch, Sir James Barrie and Mr. Roosevelt, to name no more. Naturally Adventures in Interviewing (Lane) is full of side-lights on the recent war. How could it be otherwise when so many celebrated brains are laid bare? One quotation I cannot refrain from giving. Speaking of Lord Beaverbrook he says, "He had come to London a decade ago, to live 'the life of a gentleman,' but was drawn irresistibly into politics." I challenge our literature to produce a more beautiful "but."