BACK TO ROMANCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20235, 20 April 1929, Page 7 (Supplement)

BACK TO ROMANCE.

A MODERN THREE-DECKER

Mr. Hugh Will polo anil Mr. J. B. Priestley both have their doubts, one suspects whether Romance does still bring up the 9.15. Not, at any rate for the " bang-up-to-the-minute " damsels to be found between Ludgate Circus and llyde Park Corner, some of whom look like a 1 very unpleasant type of Sixth l'orm boy and some like Brazilian money-lenders. So Mr. Walpole and Mr. Priestley put their heads together and have produced, in collaboration, a story of to-day, in the ancient manner, of " real people fifty years behind the times." Thus was born " Farthing Hall, an unashamedly old-fashioned romance told in letters between Mark French, a young bachelor and his friend Robert Newlands, middle-aged and married. Mark falls suddenly and violently in lovo with a girl who sits beside him in a London theatre. He believes her to bo in some dire trouble and hearing that she is leaving London the next day he rushes after her to the Lake Country where she dwells with a fantastic bankrupt father and a reprobate brother in the gloom of Farthing Hall. True to Victorian tradition, to save her father she has engaged herself to somo local squireen, a nebulous being who never appears in the story. Meanwhile, Xewlancls' affairs are becoming complicated by a quarrel with his wife, who departs for an unknown destination. The long-unused arm of coincidence brings the characters together in the neighbourhood of Farthing Hall, and a good, old-fashioned denouement solves all problems and leaves them " all in couples, a-kissing on the decks." In contrast to the fetid phosphorescence of tho Aldous Huxley school of fiction, " Farthing Hall " is as fresh and fragrant as a mountain breeze, but whether it is the fault of the letter-method, or of the authors themselves the women of the book do not seem to come to life. Oh, for another William de Morgan to create another Lossie Thorpe!

" Farthing Hall," by Hugh Walpole and J. B. i'lieatley (MacMillan).