PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 128, 26 November 1938, Page 27

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "Testament," by R. C. Hutchinson, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:—

Mr. Hutchinson has achieved an extraordinary task in writing a very long novel in which he captures and does not lose the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of Russia of 1917-18. The book is crowded with characters all relative to the story. They provide a background for the four main character studies which are brought out into high relief and developed as the story progresses. The principal character is Count Anton Scheffler, who had been a lawyer before the war and had fallen into the h?>bit, nev^r since lost, of defending lost causes. He was one of those rebellious champions of liberty and humanitarianism with which the more colourful pages of our history books abound. Just before the outbreak of the Revolution we find him in a hospital station, a prisoner of war. From humanitarian motives he revolts against authority—an action which lands him in gaol.

In Petrograd is his lovely wife, Yelisaveta. Possibly because of her lack of natural warmth, Scheffler has diverted his affection into the broader humanitarian channels which have finally so absorbed him that his affection for his wife has died a natural dwindling death. Yelisaveta is a. supreme egoist" who has fed on Anton's love without realising it, and now has come to the position of being without it and trying to build up relations of affection with one person after another as a more or less unsatisfactory substitute. Yelisaveta is a character for whom one can have only pity. Mr. Hutchinson's portrayal of her progression to a pitiful state of unfulfilment Ls, to say the least, magnificent. On the outbreak ox the Revolution, Anton becomes a figure over whom Trotskyites and Kerenskyites fight for possession. He finally becomes involved in a lost cause which antagonises the revolutionaries and he is executed for the breadth of his humanitarian passions and his refusal to confine his allegiance to one with which he has lost much sympathy. As a kind of subsidiary plot there is the story of Anton's friend Otraveskov's love for his wife, Natalia. These characters occupy perhaps more space in the book, and are foils to the more dramatic, vivid action of the main theme.

The end of the story of Yelisaveta is more or less what one would have expected, and rounds off the analysis of a real and interesting character. The achievement which Mr. Hutchinson has accomplished in writing an almost Tolstoiesque novel from an English county is a most unusual one. In the broad sweep of its panorama, in -he tragedy and nostalgia of its atmosphere, this book might well be the product of another school of novelists: perhaps a more real one than that with which we are familiar at present.