THE ENGLISH RULING CLASS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 125, 28 May 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ENGLISH RULING CLASS.

A STRIKING NOVEL.

Stephen McKcnna has long developed an uncommon skill in the portraiture of a social class, the English ruling class, and his skill is to be swn in its finest achievement in "The Way of the Phoenix" (Chapman and Hall). This is a sequel to "Dermotts Rampant." and unlike most sequels it is better than its original. The Dermotts are a great Irish family who have made tlieir way to affluence and power in England. One branch of the family, of course, "goes in for politics," and its head. Lord Lissenden, becomes a Liberal Cabinet Minister. His son Tony tells the story. The reader lives again in the troublous year of 1913, when Britain moved to the brink of civil war, and through the Great War, when the classes came together in a magnificent unity, so that even the Dermotts and their old enemies the patrician Strouds worked side by side, and into the first years of peace, with their quick disillusionment and temporary despair. In these later years the younger Dermotts, to the dismay of their elders, seem to have broken from the family tradition of hard work, hard saving and prudent investment, and the reader is helped to realise what profound changes the war made in England. The love story, the protracted and slightly tedious story, of Tony Lisseuden and Rhcxla Stroild, is continued in this book, in which it reaches a dubious finality, but it is subordinate to the main interest. Many readers will welcome this sense of proportion, for in many novels of the period it seems that the war was fought merely to serve as a background for a love aifair. "The Wa* of the Phoenix" is a novel weSk. worth, the reading.