"SPARKENBROKE."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

"SPARKENBROKE."

novel of high quality,

The publication of the first novel by Charles Morgan since "The Fountain attracted widespread attention four years ago has been anticipated' as a literarv event, and so it has pro\c . "Sparkenbroke" (Macmillan) whether 01 not the reader is in sympathy with its mood, cannot fail to impress him by the poetrv of its prose, the line quality of Its craftsmahsliip, and the high sc.ions11ess with whicli it deals with eternal love, art and death. There is something to suggest that Mr. Morgan took Byron as the model for Piers Sparkenbroke. He had the same habits of aristrocratic freedom, he was widely acclaimed as a poet, he was handsome, and he was notorious for his successes with women. Hut Sparkenbroke was of liner clay than Byron, more intellectual and more imaginative. His life, by all eommon standards, was selfish, anti-social, perhaps futile, but his striving for peace of mind assumes an importance that transcends those standards. Of peculiar importance in his life and work is Mary Leward, a

beautiful girl who is overwhelmed by him, marries a country doctor for security, but )V> re-attracted to the poet. Their relationship—she irresistibly attracted, he finding in her inspiration — is one of great complexity, and the reader wonders how it will end. the end is not satisfactory; the reader feels that Mr. Morgan, too, has been troubled, and that the end is artificially devised. But long before the end the reader will have been daunted by the novel's pervading qualities of reflectiveness and imagination, and a certain preoccupation with death, or he will have been caught lij) in the stream of thought and feeling and carried on, wonderingly but willingly, sure only that this novel is, in a sense that few other novels are, an experience.