PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 23

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "The Midas Touch," by Margaret Kennedy, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:—

| The devotee of Miss Kennedy's work is always prepared for eccentrics among her characters, and in "The Midas Touch," which is a study in those twin desires of human nature, love and money, the characters are unusual enough to satisfy anyone. Evan Jones, a young man of Welsh origin with a natural gift for making money, comes home to England for the first time. He is a buccaneering type, attractive, brusque, occasionally even rude. He is a Welshman born in China, twenty-seven years old, and when he reaches London' he has only sixpence in his pocket, no cares, and no responsibilities. He has the disposition and the temperament of the man who is accustomed to living on his wits. He has also acquired all the lore which a man does acquire when he is dealing with human nature in the raw, takes little upon rumour, and nothing upon-trust. His buccaneering, leads him to an association with a woman of

nearly forty, of good family, good looking, living quietly and genteelly iii the country with her equally wellbred husband. However, the associa-

tibn does not continue uninterrupted. Corris Morgan, a strong-man steel magnate, 'takes her away to London. This is really the principal thread of the story, but it reaches its main interest with the development of the character of Mrs. Carter Blake, otherwise Bessie, who is a widow with four children, and a practising clairvoyant. She happens to be a genuine medium, but, like Evan, lives on her wits and practises all sorts of little deceptions with a view to making a living from her powers. While there is a lot of humbug about her methods, she is presented as being at heart sincere. By devious means she works upon Morgan and brings him, without any real intention of doing so, to his destruction. Evan also is implicated, to his undoing. ■ -• . •

Miss Kennedy's oddities are generally mixed up with the artistic or musical sets who inhabit the world's cities.•'■'. This, time she has chosen to present the, impact of her abnormal characters upon imbre normal environments. . She has given us a taste of the peculiar situations... iri^p wfoich. quite ordinary people can be landed by the fascination of the various kinds of attraction, which 'g0.., under,. the generic heading1 of glamour.; " The episode' of Lydia ;Jekyll,ta: fortyisli -country lady, while odd and peculiar, has its own pathos and its-own trueness.to life. ;

There is nothing very striking about the book except that it does treat of oddities and is a .rather entertaining commentary upon some human re^ actions. The desire for love leadk some of the characters into all sorts of curious bypaths, leads them to kick over the traces and break the rules, and places them sometimes in intolerable situations. The desire for money in the other characters, grown equally, out of proportion, wreaksa similar havoc, with their lives. •.■■'■: X ■

The book suffers from the .coiranipn. fault '^wliicli is" to r be if ouESTm -most of Miss- Kennedy's work;' that the characters are too exaggerated to be entirely real, that they are all slightly caricatured, and that the characters all being odd lose immensely by comparison with the single odd character in any book,..the. greater, number .of characters in which are completely normal. A caricature stands out in a gallery of drawings: there is an air of unreality, about.... a gallery.... of caricatures. None the less, for the reader seeking entertainment and not verisimilitude;:1 and for the reader who can recognise truth in a caricature without being bothered to try to find his way through subtle characterisation, the book will provide excellent entertainment .and some shrewd observations on current life. RECENT JLIBEARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows:—General: "The White-coated Army," by J. Harpole; "Desert and Delta," by E. S. Jarvis; "My Eskimo Life," by P. E, Victor. Fiction: "The Yearling," by M. K. Rawlings; "St. Peterte Finger," ■by G. Mitchell; "Smoke of Battle," by R. W. Chambers.