WARWICK DEEPING'S LATEST

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 115, 17 May 1930, Page 21

WARWICK DEEPING'S LATEST

"Exiles," by "Warwick Deeping. London: Cassells* With the present day fondness of boys names for girls, Warwick .Deeping christens his heroine "Billy," and her other name is Brown. The authof knows his market, knows what, sells. Billy Brown, considered as an actual person, may or may not be true to form, but there will be no doubt in the minds of the admirers of Mr. Deeping's art of her popularity. She ia an essentially modern gW, and keeping herself fit, physically and morally, seems to be her supreme object in life. "Fit" in a monetary sense she is jot and her circumstances make it desirable that she should' go to Southern Italy as assistant in an English library at a town that Mr. Deeping has named Tiudaro. Generally it resembles that land referred to iii missionary hymn Where everyi prospect pleases, Ami only man is vile. There is a very mixed lot of English and Americans' constituting the AngloSaxon colony in Tindaro whose literary appetites are ministered to by Miss Lord, employer of Billy. In writing to her mother about the people • she meets in Tiudaro, Billy classifies as under: — . The society here la really marvellous. You have to catalogue it to understand it properly. A. Tho hotel people. Mostly old. Lots of Sir Somebodies and Americans. The "Eiyseo de Luxe, the "Bristol" not quite so much so. The "St. George" and the "Florlo" rather flyblown. :, B. The English and American villa colony . . . they give tea-parties. You stand about, and try to balance a chocolate eclair In your saucer, and hear all the gossip. Bather highbrow and very "cleeky," quite in the ,golf C.Us. The doctor, the lace-shop, the antlchita shop, the library. .' D. Stands for the damned. I haven't met any of the damned yet. Except one or two mild ones who came.to the library. Odd people, with lurid pasta or something. Miss L. calls them the exiles, people who live out here always, and can't go home. f Billy meets Oscar Slade, an artist in Tindaro. He has an unsavoury reputation even in tolerant Tindaro, bus he makes love to Billy—and she lets him, toys with him in facty and, like a child playing with an electric toaster in action, Billy burns 'her fingers. But in her quest for bodfly fitness she includes business efficiency, and so she makes a success of her position in the library. Is it necessary to add that Billy survives her trials and disillusions and meets the only man for her? Mr. Deeping revels in local colour and he is a master in the use of sentences in inverted commas. •