20–26105
The hero is a man of great intellectual power, dynamic physical energy and sudden quixotic impulses. After he has spent eighteen years of voluntary exile in China—self imposed because he fears to compromise the girl he loves—and two years of hermitlike seclusion on the moor with a fascinating and erudite young Chinese student, a German bomb from a zeppelin shocks him into a dazed knowledge of the European war. Wide awake, action hungry, he scorns his former achievements as a mathematical genius and brilliant Chinese scholar, plunges into political activities, gets “hitched on to” the war, and becomes the man of the hour. The old distasteful personal ties are broken through his wife’s death and the lapse of the years. New ones are forged and he learns that he has a fine son of whom he had not even dreamed. Life in London has become sweet and full and he desires no change. But once more the quixotic impulse asserts itself—a sacrifice becomes necessary for the sake of his officer son’s career, and he is off to China again.
“A typically interesting Locke story. The book ends rather weakly.”
+ − Booklist 16:204 Mr ’20
“Mr Locke has written many stories better than ‘The house of Baltazar,’ but there are few of them in which his neglected opportunities were greater. The truth is that he, like many other novelists, is obsessed by the necessity of making the war and its far-reaching effects a part of his fiction.” E. F. E.
+ − Boston Transcript p6 Ja 21 ’20 1260w + Dial 68:537 Ap ’20 20w + Ind 103:54 Jl 10 ’20 110w
“But, after all, it is Baltazar himself who is the book, and he is always a joy.”
+ − N Y Times 25:38 Ja 25 ’20 1150w + Outlook 124:430 Mr 10 ’20 200w
“A captious reader might complain that Mr Locke has tried to do too many things at once, that a single novel simply has not sufficient space to include the big issues of feminism, profiteering, labour unrest and the thousand and one elements of contemporary social upheaval. But Mr Locke’s readers are not inclined to be captious.” F. T. Cooper