+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p586 S 9 ’20 300w
WASHBURN, CLAUDE CARLOS. Order. *$2 (1½c) Duffield
20–4014
Marville, the beautiful residential suburb of a big city was law and order incarnate—order with all its ugly sordid features pruned away, beautified and civilized. Into it blows its antithesis, the spirit of romance in the person of Peter Gresham, Englishman, packed off to America by his aristocratic relatives. He literally explodes into Marville in a train wreck, becomes its hero, and later upsets the tranquillity of everybody with whom he comes in contact. The reactions of this spirit of romance on law and order form the substance of the story. By one man and one woman it is understood. Peter himself does not understand but is it, and when it brings him in contact with Annette Cornish, beautiful young wife of an elderly man, there is fire. Others are simply stimulated, bewildered, shaken out of their repose for the nonce. Annette and pretty Elsie Cook succumb completely to its spell. Annette, disciplined and broken-in by order from childhood, fears it and is broken by it. Elsie, the half-savage, gives herself to it unstintingly, but comes out with flying colors by dint of a saving remnant of hard practical sense. Peter turns his back on it all and is killed at Neuve Chapelle.
“Exceptionally interesting story. Here we have a book of ideas which is never didactic, but presents both sides of a case with striking fairness, a tale whose plot springs from the natural interplay of character upon character, and whose lights and shadows are managed with notable artistry.”
+ N Y Times 25:190 Ap 18 ’20 100w
Reviewed by H. W. Boynton
Review 2:393 Ap 17 ’20 120w + Springf’d Republican p13a Ap 18 ’20 320w
WASHBURNE, CARLETON W. Common science. il *$1.60 World bk. 502