WHEN THE WORLD STOPPED.

Southland Times, Issue 22074, 22 July 1933, Page 11

WHEN THE WORLD STOPPED.

If you haven’t been impressed by the splendid work in Neil Bell’s previous work, or if you consider a novelist should have a pleasant holiday if he deserts, you will enjoy “The Lord of Life.” What I mean is that though “The Lord of Life” is not as good a work as one expects to have from Neil Bell’s pen, it is undoubtedly absorbing. There is no anxiety about the probabilities. A dear old scientist succeeds in annihilating a few atoms, and the earth stops spinning for a few moments. As a result nearly everyone goes spinning off into space —possibly to become planetary dust, though we needn’t worry about that. A party of nineteen men and one woman remains. These people were in a submarine on the bottom of the Mediterranean when the earth faltered, and they come to the surface to find the world they left when they submerged altered a great deal. This idea of the remnant of the human race has been used dozens of times, but it is always interesting. Sylvia is the one woman and she becomes the wife of eighteen of the men in turn, but all her children are boys, so that the regeneration of the world’s people seems hopeless. The nineteenth is Sid, whose parents were sordid in sordid surroundings. But Sid had his ideas and he refused to marry the last woman in the world, who, by virtue of that lonely post, was the Queen of the Earth in the eyes of the men. To escape her Sid dashes off in a motor boat that had been saved when most of the other unattached things went whirling away, and when his little ark ran out of fuel there came an aeroplane carrying a beautiful American girl back to her island home. So a new Adam meets the new Eve and they go home to the new Eden. Neil Bell carries us through a wealth of detail, but there are many things which require a heap of explaining. Accepting the possibility of the earth’s halt, the reader finds himself marvelling at inconsistencies. If he doesn’t worry himself too much about these things he will enjoy the boyishness of the tale.

“The Lord of Life,” by Neil Bell (Messrs Collins Ltd, London).