PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 100, 30 April 1938, Page 27

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Chief Librarian of the Wellington Public Libraries has chosen "Lord Samarkand," by H. A. Vachell, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:—

In "Lord Samarkand," Mr. Vachell completes a trilogy of which the first book was that highly romanticised, extremely improbable, but in its own ingenuous way rather appealing story, "The Hill." Most men remember some such character as Demon Scaifc, one of those worthless young men, brilliant at athletics, idolised by the less penetrating of his school fellows, but "hairy at the heel." "Hairy-heeled" is an expression which one remembers to have heard several times .in "The Hill." Egerton, the immaculate Caterpillar, who paid more attention to family than anything else, and knew his Debrett and Burke backwards, was always murmuring it in, a deprecating way about Scaife. Scaife did not improve as he grew up. He became a Press lord of the most improbable kind, brilliantly successful as always, but married to a Roman Catholic woman whose religious beliefs make a divorce impossible. He is not certain whether the boy he calls his son is his own, although he makes the most amazing (and amusing) efforts to find out, but he is not himself above reproach because there is a woman who works in Samarkand House, very intelligent and very much in love with him, whom he makes his mistress. She is genuinely in love with him, in spite of the fact that Gerard, his son, is about the same age as she is.

It is most extraordinary how Mr. Vachell slaps on atmosphere with a thick brush. What many people mistook on its first appearance for a real public school atmosphere turns out to be not much more than a novelist's stock-in-trade in presenting a sentimental background. The reviewers on the whole, when this book appeared, poked a certain amount of fun at it, the "Observer" saying: "Young men educ. Eton and Harrow, do not say 'on my honour', and 'ever so,' nor find academic euphemisms for 'guts'"; while the "Spectator," referring to the Demon as "hairy-heeled"—"whatever that is" —says that apparently it is an almost incurable affliction about which your best friends won't tell you. Miss Kate O'Brien, who wrote this latter review, says with an acidity of which she is sometimes capable: "It may be assumed he has written in 'Lord Samarkand' a fantasy which will appeal to all those who know beyond a peradventrue that they are not 'hairy-heeled.'"

That, of course, is the book's defect. It has two appeals: one, the appeal of a not very common kind of story about an unsuccessful marriage in which the hufband ha^gone off the rails, and the other, an appeal founded on snobbery. For many: people Mr. Vachell will have written a very readable book, but others will see that his tongue is just a little too much in his cheek, and will admire the manner, adroitness, dexterity, while unfortunately being able to see the wheels go round. There is no quesion about it that even writing to formula for a very lowmiddlebrow .public, Mr. Vachell always succeeds in being entirely readable and Succeeds in sustaining the interest, even ■when, he is least credible, and (dare one say"ft) TnosVTffistQmticaHy vacuous. '..-., -BEOENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows:— General.—"Helen Keller's Journal," by H. A. Keller; "Little Yellow Gentleman," by H. J. May; "World-Birth," by S. Desmond. Fiction. —"Secret Information," by R. Hichens; "This Narrow World," by. E. Bigland; "Head in Green Bronze," by Sir H. S. Walpole.