PORTRAIT OF AN UNCLE

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

PORTRAIT OF AN UNCLE

“Uncle Lawrence,” by Oliver Warner (London: Chatto and Wiudus).

Uncle Lawrence live.d in Canada; on an island toward the western end of Lake Erie, far from the England of his upbringing. With the passing of years little more than a memory of him was left to his family, and to the younger generation he was something of a legend, his occasional letters bringing a glimpse of an existence and surroundings so different froip their own. Mr. Warner, as a young man, decided to visit his uncle. Describing their first meeting he says:—

Our feelings, as wc walked dawn the ■gangway, must have been widely different. Lawrence was so overcome at this culmination of years of isolation that he was speechless. As for me, I realized even If I could not understand his emotion; I knew my role. It was not I who mattered, not my character or motives: it was the mere presence on Pelee of anyone of his own which moved him. ’The worn tag about blood being thicker than water I felt once more to be utterly true.

The sensitivity and sympathy which Mr. Warner exhibits in this passage are constant throughout the book. It is a gentle story as he tells it, the story of an unassuming man, proud in poverty, clinging to his long-remembered English associations, ait exile helpless in a world of small comfort and entirely alien environment. It says much for Mr, Warner’s skill in . portrayal that he has been able to avoid any element of caricature and yet recreate from the past a lifelike figure which is likelv to remain long in the memories of his readers. He tells a true story, true as much because of its art as of its facts.