The tragedy of the title, altho the central incident of the book, is by no means its central theme. The tragedy is the death of old James Borrowdale, and the subsequent trial of his young wife Flora and her friend Cecil Twyfold for his murder, of which they are acquitted. The major part of the book, however, is taken up with the love of Cecil and Flora, its development while Flora was still bound and the reaction of the tragedy upon them. The expansion of their characters is along lines contrary to convention, as Cecil expresses it, they have taken the “downward path to salvation,” downward, that is, from the standards of material success that the world sets up. A plea for individual freedom, as opposed to the usages of conventional society, is really the keynote of the book.
“There is an undeniable simplicity in the writer’s style, a genial mellowness that in a tale like this is really extraordinary. There is hardly a writer today that could take the structure of this novel and its strong plea for individualism as opposed to social conventions, with its technically unhappy ending, and not make it despite brilliancy, a hard and cynical book. On the contrary Dr Dawson has written with deep humanness and charm. We have had the fortune to read few novels of the present season with such genuine delight.” S. L. C.
+ Boston Transcript p8 D 1 ’20 420w
DAY, CLARENCE SHEPARD, jr. This simian world. il *$1.50 Knopf 817.
20–10010
Ours is a simian civilization. If we had not descended from the monkey what would our world be like from the point of view of extraterrestrial beings? If the ant and the bee, or the big cats, or the elephant or any of the other beasts had achieved the hegemony? Such whimsical questions with their conjectures were suggested by a Sunday afternoon Broadway crowd to the author and his friend Potter. The author’s illustrations are as amusing as his fancies.
“It was a good idea, and Mr Day has a real though immature gift of lightness in treating a solid subject. But his theme is really too big for his ninety pages, and although his thinking is honest and courageous it tends to become unsubstantial.”
+ − Ath p145 Jl 30 ’19 150w