+ − Am Hist R 26:119 O ’20 680w
“Will interest students of history.”
+ Booklist 16:310 Je ’20 Boston Transcript p4 Ap 21 ’20 550w
Reviewed by J: C. Rose
+ Review 2:601 Je 5 ’20 1050w R of Rs 61:671 Je ’20 80w
CONRAD, JOSEPH. Rescue: a romance of the shallows. *$2 (1c) Doubleday
20–10316
Mr Conrad’s new tale of the South Seas is the story of a man torn between loyalty to friend and love of woman, forced to choose between faith to his plighted word and her safety. It is a story of a generation ago with civil war rife among the native tribes of the Malay straits. Captain Tom Lingard has pledged his all to the service of Rajah Hassim and has plotted and contrived to restore him to his kingdom. The enterprise has reached its climax when an English yacht blunders into the scene of activity and runs aground. Captain Lingard goes aboard her with offers of assistance, his one thought to get the intruders out of the way. His offer is met with insolence on the part of the owner and he would gladly have left them to their fate, but he had seen the woman, Mrs Travers, and her spell is on him. Thereafter these two are but puppets in the hands of fate and the outcome is the wreck of all Lingard’s hopes and the failure of the cause he had served.
“This fascinating book revives in use the youthful feeling that we are not so much reading a story of adventure as living in and through it, absorbing it, making it our own. This feeling is not wholly the result of the method, the style which the author has chosen; it arises more truly from the quality of the emotion in which the book is steeped.” K. M.