D. M. S.
Lady. "And why did you leave your last situation?"
Prospective Maid. "Well, that's a bit inquisitive, ain't it, Mum? I didn't ask you why your last girl left you.">[
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I am as a rule very strongly against the form of pedantry that hastens to cry "imitation" whenever a new writer finds himself impelled to a theme of the same character as that already associated with an old-established practitioner. But in the case of The Lost Horizon (Methuen) I find myself overwhelmed. Consciously or unconsciously Mr. G. Colby Borley has produced a story that in matter and treatment is so palpably a reflection of Joseph Conrad that the likeness simply refuses to be ignored. It is in its way a good story enough—an affair of adventure in South America and on the high seas, with a generous sufficiency of oaths and blood-letting; a tale moreover that gives evidence (in spite of that distressing echo) of being written by one who takes his craft with a becoming dignity of purpose. One peculiarity of the Master has not only been borrowed by Mr. Borley, but exaggerated to his own undoing: I mean the trick of introducing a character or group of characters so clogged and obscured by the adhesions of the uncommunicated past that not till this has been gradually flaked from them do they emerge as figures in whom it is possible to take an intelligent interest. In the present instance this process is delayed for more than half the book. As for the intrigue, that concerns a group of cut-throat Europeans, who, having been ruinously involved in a South American revolution, are now further plunged into the plots of a scoundrelly African magnate and his conspiratorial gang. For myself, I parted from them all with a feeling of regret that they had not explained themselves earlier as the entertaining villains that they turned out to be.