Books.

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 16, 2 November 1928, Page 13

Books.

COMFORTLESS MEMORY.

Maurice

Baring

(NCE upon a time Robert Browning, the poet, wrote some dramatic rhymes concerning 2 man who, to save a friend from ruining his life through infatuation for a light woman, averts the disaster by taking the lady for himself. "An-eagle am I with my fame in the world! A wren is he with his maiden’s face!" The theme of Mr. Maurice Baring’s recently published "Comfortless Memory" is so identical with that of the poem that one guesses whence came inspiration, more particularly when a line of it. appears on the title page. The narrator, middle-aged writer and consummate man of affairs, on the erest of a wave of popular adulation. enters the romantic arena in order to rescue a youthful painter of promise from the wiles and wickedness of Jenny True, blue-eyed, of a grace surpass-

ing, and living the gay life indeed on the fringe of frothy Continental society. Succumbing to the sophisticated advances of the elderly Orlando, and too late discovering his philanthropic motive in wooing her not ungenerous fay-_ ours, the frail and fascinating quarry indignantly reproaches him in words as pertinent as those of the poet:- © "Never mind that youth! What harm had I done to you?" That Mr. Baring writes with ease and graceful distinction his earlier books proved beyond cavil. His latest novel is mostly concerned with the emotion of love of one kind and another, never of a very sublime quality, and leading to much violence of speech and action, finally resulting in the death of the lovely protagonist. As a presentment of a cosmopolitan society foregatheriing in various Italian towns, the book has a vividly descriptive touch ; but Jenny, the declassee, | charmer of hearts and full of posings and posturings as Lady Hamilton herself, lacks that semblance of reality which, failing to achieve, the most accomplished raconteur fails to scale those "heights by ereat men

reached and kept.’

R.U.

R.