NOTABLE NEW BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19144, 29 October 1927, Page 13

NOTABLE NEW BOOKS.

[Wo print below recent reviews of two notable books.] J "Right Off the Map."—By C. E. Montague. Mr 0. E. Montague's new novel '•Right off tho Map'' is of the nature of a fantasy: that is to say, it rests upon an impossible foundation, given which all tho incidents and characters are probable. Two adjacent republics, Ria and Porni, divided by a mountain chain and a sandy desert, go to war because gold has been found upon the ilUlefined frontier-lino in the desert. They are off the map; there are no international complications and! alliances. Ria is purely English— English, that is, in tho way that a convinced Liberal might satirically seo it. Though a republic, its Government and leading citizens are of "the best people"; its electorate is kept select by the requirement that voters must be able to read two languages; its working class is a mixture of the English working elassew; it has a bellicose and hectoring Bishop who is an embodiment of militant Toryism, an optimistic educationist who, living softly, dreams that he lives dangerously, a dishonest captain of industry who causes the war, buys the Press to support it, sells bad boots to the Government, and collects old masters, and an extremely inefficient War Office. Besides, it has an important newspaper, "The Voice," whose editor and ail-but half-owner has "tho true mind of an orator." He enjoys his own cloquonce, but, haiving no principles, he employs it to dress up in righteous speech those convictions which other people easily palm off upon him, none so easily as his wife, a indy who lives upon her nerves and cares nothing so long- ns they get a series of fillips from the drama of life. There being all the elements of snobbishness, ignorance, hypocrisy, inefficiency, and immorality aboundingly present in those who shape tho policy of Ria, it is not surprising that the Port ans, a mixed race of British, Americans, Germans, and Dutch, who fipeak English but act like tho host Germans, easily win, and that the few heroes to lie found in the Rian Army are betrayed by the cravens; with the result that, having drunk the cup of ignominy to the dregs, Ria is annexed to Porta, and tho leader of the Rian forlorn hope, a pure-hearted soldier-man called Willan. is hanged as a mutineeer. It would bo very interesting tp speculate in what direction Mr Montague's remarkable powers—now long known to us—of .literary, expression and moral indignation would have led him had the war of 1914 not broken out at all. The contempt in which he holds some typical weaknesses of British character and English society, his hatred of all that is moan and underhand, his admiration for true courage, a moral quality not to he confused with useless gallantry in action, and his despair at the obscuration of clear thinking by the combined forces of worn-out tradition, commercial dishonesty, and political charlatanry, were all present in "The Hind Let Loose." The Great War has given them a direction and a particular tinge—perhaps they needed no smaller crisis to give them their finest edge—which have to bo accepted" as unchangeable facts. To estimate the success of this book as a satire of existing things would be impossible without entering into many apparently irrelevant considerations. There are, of course, Bishops like Bishop Case, who fervently blessed the war, yet rose in austere wrath against the Government at the first reverse; there are rogues like Bute and loud-mouthing cowards like Brow-ell; and there are certainly characters like Burnage, tho editorstatesman, besotted with adoration for his contemptuous wife and capable of I any tergiversation to gain a smile from ! her, just as there are, and always have been, officers like Colonel Main, who believe that war is a superior cricket and behave accordingly. Yet the total effect here is of an over-accumulation, through which a combination of evil possibilities fails to become even a satirical probability. We therefore dwell all the more gratefully on the purely narrative side of this book. Given its subject, "Right Off the Map," is an excellent story, beautifully told and so contrived, that it is exciting to the end. The best passages are brilliant, notably that describing the approach march of the ill-trained brigade to its destruction in the mountain pass, the first casualties, the battle, and the rout. Twilight had come by that time. In the failing light the dregs of tho rout could just be seen by tho friends -whom they had deserted. It looked liko the Inst swirl of soiled -water you lot out of a basin when you have finished washing your hands and have pulled out tho l'hig , „ i —a homely simile, but wonderfully apt. Tho retreat of the 900 staunch survivors under Major Willan over a goatherd's path into the I-ost Valley, their recuperation there, and the epic of the fevered bootmaking, to the song of ihe soldiers, by the inhabitant* are touches of imagination to which all readers will thrill with pleasure, as they will thrill with indignation at the dastardly surrender of Burnage the editor and Prime Minister, just as the surprise was ripe to fall on the enemy's rear. Willan, the pure soldier, who has luved for fighting, a little shamefacedly, as the greatest of all snorts, is tho character into whom Mr Montague has thrown all his sympathy. He was "unbedevilled" ; he had not lost the faculty of wonder. What Mr Montague demands of the world is that it should unbedevil itself and that a child's heart and a man's understanding should more often go together.—"Times'* Literary Supplement.

The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. Ten or twelve now living will never die; and several of these immortals are Mr Wells. There is the immortal Wells who wrote this, and the immortal Wells who wrote that; and probably (if you will allow me the paradox) the most immortal of them is the Wells who wrote the short stories. I have been browsing on this fat volume for weeks, at odd moments: recognising old friends: making new ones: and marvelling at the versatility of the writers humanity. He touches life at a thousand points: laughs at it, admires it, weeps with it, tickles it, lectures it, and adorns it: is everything by turns, and nothing wrong. Not that he is always successful (inhumanity wouia come in there); but that, even when the storv is slight, or the inspiration thin- or the point blunt, there remains a wealth of something to recommend the miss as a,palpable and most engaging hit. You can judge a man, sometimes, by his worst—there are stories in this vast collection which were probably produced as pot-boilers—and one 8 mind merely registers, in admiration: 'How good, at his worst, the man is I As for the best, one's danger in criticising them is hyperbole. I read in the columns of a contemporary that "The Oountrv of the Blind" was the best short story in the language; and, suspicions always of a superlative, I immediately got busy trying to think of a better one. J couldn't do it. Can you? There is room, of course, for legitimate difference of opinion; but can you think of any English story which is certainly, recognisably, more beautiful or more moving or more profound than that brief masterpiece of Mr Wells's? In an entirely different vein, is not "The Plattner Story" perfect? Can vn-u ever forget "The Door in the Wall''?— or "The Magic Shop"? —or "Pollock and the Porrob Man"? And, then, this volume contains "The Time Machine"! In "Little Mother of tie Morderberg," a story deliciouslv ridiculous, Mr Wefla describes, in a phrase charao-

teristic of his method, height and the precipitous: "The Magenruhe Hotel wa-: at our toes, hidden, so to s.xjak, bj our chins." In the tale of tiho ic.vi who worked miracles, little Mf Foih'.-r----ingny sends a fellow-creature : to Hado*. and his comment is: "I didn't hardly mean as much as that." Such thine? are no casual felicities; they are ».he method of Mr W«Hb'« sanity.-—Gerald Gould in the "Observer."