A CONSPICUOUS NOVEL

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1715, 11 January 1905, Page 14

A CONSPICUOUS NOVEL

“John Ohilcote, M.P.” By K. Cecil Thurston. Win Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and Bond on. J. and W. Davidson, Wellington. The them© is not fresh, but its treatment is fascinating and original. W© have had studies in physiology before John Ohilcote was created, but it :is seldom a novelist, by her second venture, commands so much attention and popularity. John Ohilcote is M.P. for Wark. Socially and politically he is in the first rank, but h© is devoid of ambition and a victim to the morphia habit. In a moment of depression, brought on by his besetting vice, he meets a stranger, John Locler, his “double, ” who is as open to the influences of ambition as Ohilcote is to the attractions of morphia. To achieve his own dissolute ends he plays upon Loder’s ambition, and the two change shoes, the world —even the M.P.’s wife—being none the wiser. The reader’s sympathies are naturally with the capable man who has been denied his chance. The motif is not new, but- it is never uninteresting, and Mrs Thurston uses it with rare skill, feeling, taste and power of detachment. Her account of Loder’s career as Ohilcote cannot but ho followed with almost breathless interest by th© most jaded novel reader, and sympathy with th© impostor Ls helped, rather than hindered, at the critical moment of discovery by Lillian Astrupp, by foreknowledge of this woman’s scr-pent-like nature. The real Ohilcote dying opportunely, and, apparently, being buried as -Tobn Loder. Lady As-

trupp’s power of proof is taKen away. For a moment the old shame of imposture returns to LodeEs mind; he would go abtoad, and, by trying to win, in a foreign country, in his own person, the success he had achieved in England by posing as another, prove himself worthy of the woman —well-named Eve -—whom he had grown to love, and who had grown to* love him. Eve Ohilcote is a delightful study of the society woman. She, too, has come to regard Loder, and when he is about to quit England with all its glory for himself as a brilliant public man although in the place of another, she tells him not to throw away the substance for the shadow. The three characters—Ghilcote, Loder and Eve*—live in this realistic and graphic story. It is a brilliant piece of make-believe, and Mrs Thurston’s readers will accord to her a high measure of praise for the powerful and absorbing interest “Mr John Ohilcote, M.P.,” invokes.