BOOK NOTICES.

Southern Cross, Volume 27, Issue 23, 13 September 1919, Page 15

BOOK NOTICES.

““FISHPINQLE.”

Novel readers are indebted to Horace A. Vachell for many hours of unalloyed delight. His books not only amuse, but instruct, but the pill, if it may be socalled, is so skilfully coated that the reader is wholly unaware of its existence, and swallows the mixture with huge content. In the case under review, Mr Vachell does his work so well that but for the preface none would guess his purpose, which is, in effect, to bring about a change for the better in the squireoeracy of Britain. _ His example. Sir Geoffrey Pomfret, is a charming survival of a bygone age—the squire who seeks to play the part of a benevolent despot towards his tenants, taking a hand in their marriages and deciding for them a hundred and one other things. He is great on eugenics, but unfortunately for his theories the right couples, from his point of view, refuse to mate, and this leads to some droll situations. Even his own son and heir declines to be dictated to in this matter, and wins a life partner in the parson’s daughter instead of Lady Margot—" She s a dasher,” the squire admiringly called her —-who came on a visit from London and temporarily disturbed the serenity of the beautiful country home by her society ways. She, however, soon saw how the wind lay, and made a graceful exit. While the squire frets and fusses over such things, his estate falls into decay, ancl ultimate ruin is only averted by Lady Pomfret and Fisiipingle the butler, who has been m the service of the family for many vears. How they and the son join m a kindly conspiracy to humour the old squire, and at the same time bring him round to their way of thinking, is admirably told. Plot there is little or none, save the explanation near the end of the rnvsterv attending Fishpingle’s birth. A capital book —you ,pan’t help loving its characters and feeling the better for having been in their company. London: John Murray.

“SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS.”

In these davs of efficiency and nothing but efficiency, it is pleasant to meet with a book that doesn’t loolr at life from Mr Gradgrind’s point of view as expounded in {Dickens’s “Hard Times. The author, C. E. Lawrence, takes his readers to a London flat, the home of Fitzrov Stone and his wife Jessie. They lead a narrow, uneventful life, with few breaks in a routine that deadens their sense of everything but the immediate necessities of existence. On Sundays they attend the chapel of a small sect called “The New Religionists,” whose pastor is also their master, a domestic tyrant in his home, and a preacher who brooks no contradiction from his flock. Fitzrov and he fall out in an argument over the reality of matter, and then the clerk has a fall from a ’bus, and wakes up to find himself sitting on the kerb with a crowd round him and a policeman wanting to know what is the matter. Fitzrov has lost all knowledge of his accident, but from _ that day he gives way to fancies that people the crowded streets of the metropolis with people of the past. He jostles the real people with unseeing eyes as he greets Cromwell, Wellington, Nelson, Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, and many another. In his imaginary conversations the word “duty 1 ’ looms'large. and this is made to convey indirectly a lesson to the citizens of to-dav. Of course Fitzroy’s foible or weakness —call it what you will—threatens estrangement from his practical, home-loving wife, who has no time for visions and such-like. Eventually, the excitement incidental to a double personality tells on Stone, there is a surgical operation on the brain which a specialist says was injured in his fall from the ’bus, and then he paSvSes out, muttering, “It is matter that does not matter.” The only character in the novel who understands Fitzroy and sympathises with his excursions into the past, is the lovable old reprobate, Jessie’s Uncle Zeph, wild between his drinking bouts is by turns poet, philosopher, and denouncer of the smug hypocrisies of life. Mr Lawrence has done his work well—has written a book with lessons of which the world 1 ' stands, in need. London: John Murray.