SOME RECENT FICTION.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2384, 13 February 1915, Page 5

SOME RECENT FICTION.

(By Liber.)

TWO JOHN LANE NOVELS. Mr. John Lane is a, publisher who can always bo depended upon to givu us some fiction of an original and attractive kind, and two recent additions to the , well-known and always-welcome "Bodloy Hand Books" make exceptionally good reading. The first, "Battle Royal," by W. De Veer, takes us to the Dutch East Indies, .the sub-title being "A Western Drama in an Eastern Land." The leading character, a Dutch Government official,, is about to make a trip to Holland, there to marry a young lady he has met some years previously. Unfortunately, whilst' waiting for his steamer he meets aJid renews acquaintance with'a married lady, with whom previous to his appointment to an important post on another island, he had had an intrigue. He fights against the old and renewed fascination, but.just as the moth persists in fluttering round the candle, he finds his old passion reviving. The result is that he goes to the lady's house, in the husband's absence, only to overhear a conversation which proves that ' the woman bad a third string to her bow. Disillusioned, disgusted, he leaves the house, but is 6hot by the husband, who mistakes him for string No. 2. The author is successful in depicting the strength of those elemental passions which find expression only too naturally in the tropics,' and the local colour of the story is very picturesque. In Mr. George Stevenson's story; "Jenny Cartwright," another new John Lane publication, we are introduced to ■quite a different atmosphere from that of "Battle Royal." The scene is here a north country village, • the leading figure being a highly emotional girl,_ the daughter of a reprieved murderer, vision haunted, from her childhood, and falling quite naturally into a state of mind from which.is developed a succeeding state of religious mania, a mania which in the end finds a tragic expression, for the poor creature eventually offers herself as a sacrifice for what, in her pious and ; morbid exaltation, she deems the hopeless sinfulness of the snrrounding world. ' Grim as is the motif of the istory, Mr. Stevenson's study of an abnormal mind not without a certain pathetic and impressive bennty. The author's'exposure of the narrow-mind-ed point of view, social and theological, of such' a community as'that froin which he takes his leading characters, is conceived and carried out very ably.