SATIRE ON CONTEMPORARY LIFE

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 148, 18 March 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

SATIRE ON CONTEMPORARY LIFE

“Impromptu in Moribundia,” by Patrick Hamilton (Loudon: Constable). Mr. Patrick Hamilton, author of “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky,” has already made bis reputation as a fine novelist. He is a writer with a broad outlook and a most refreshing sense of humour. This latter attribute lie turns to good purpose in “Impromptu iu Moribundia,” a brilliant imaginative work iu which he seizes upon certain of the less desirable aspects of eouteinparory life, and shows them for what they are in the revealing light of tierce satire, though the satire is tempered and so made agreeable to the general reader by the wittiness with which it is presented. Moribundia, “the land in which the ideals and ideas of our world, the striving and subconscious wishes of our time, the fictions and figments of our imagination, are calm, cold actualities,” at once fascinates and repels. The people who inhabit it will be readily recognizable to all with any knowledge of present-day literature, particularly advertising literature. To follow Hie adventures of Mr. Hamilton’s hero is this strange, yet startlingly familiar country is a chastening experience, but an experience, nevertheless, which is well worth undergoing. Mr. Hamlltondiolds up to his contemporaries a mirror in which their aspirations and activities are marked clearly at their true value. It is an achievement deserving of unstinted praise, providing ns it does, not only stimulating material for the serious-minded reader, but also bright entertainment for those in search merely' of amusement.