REVIEW.

Evening Post, Volume LII, Issue 162, 30 November 1896, Page 2

REVIEW.

" The Angel Isafbel," a story of Prohibition in New Zealand. By G. M. Reed, B.A. Wilsons and Horton, Queen and Wyndham streets, Auckland. A simple, pathetic jtory this, of a singularly pure, idealic young life, devoted and sacrificed to a great cause — the cause of temperance in the matter of alcoholic drinks carried to the extreme objective of Prohibition. It is well and touchingly told, and the heroine, "Angel Isafrel" Chalmers, is so firmly and vividly portrayed as to figure as almost a living identity. The novel with a purpose is a bold line for even the author who has " made his mark" to venture upon. He at least has his own " public "as a strategic base on which to depend for the moral support that is sure to he needed in the issues he creates. But for the comparatively unknown author, seeking to enter the sacred arena, it is a venturesome step indeed, and, cleverly as his story is told, we cannot help wishing that Mr. Reed had exerted his undoubted talent in the direction of fiction undorainated by a special text. Apart from this, the story will be read with interest and no small amount of instruction, since its leading motif provides food for much thought, even by those who will be antagonistic to it. Mr. Seed, of course, as a journalist of standing and experience, melds the pen of a ready writer. His literary, conversational, and descriptive work is good, his situations telling, and his characters realities, not automata. Angel Isafrel, as the Joan of Arc of the Prohibition movement — which, in Mr. Reed's story, is ultimately successful by a threefourths vote of the whole colony — is a noble conception, admirably worked out. The dramatis persons have the smallest of small parts. There are, of course, crudities in the book, and a vein of sadness, which in our opinion need not have permeated it. But as a work of pretension in story-telling, the' pointing of a moral set aside, it gives promise of better things to come, and we hope to have the pleasure of welcoming them in due course. It is high time New Zealand story-tellers began to take a place among the ranks of the recognised novelists. Now, Mr. Eeed, besides his leading position among 'Australasian journalists, is not altogether unknown")^ a writer of fiction. His first and smaller work of this kind was " The Great Experiment," which had a fair measure of success, and led to expectations which in Angel Isafrel's tragic though brief life story have been partly realised. The work is, of course; not faultless, and we do not agree with its dominant theme, but we can honcitly commend it to our readers generally.