"Catherine Herself," By James Hilton, Fisher Unwin, 8", net.
"The Granite Hills." By 0. E. Heanley. Chapman and Hall. 7s. 64, net.
"Cords of Vanity." By David Hennessey. Hodder and Stoughton. 83. 6d, net.
"The Man with Three Names." By Harold MacGrath, Hutchinson. 8. 6d. net.
The Straight Furrow."" By Rutherford, Melrose, 7s, net.
"Kindred of the Dust." By Peter B. Kyrie. Hodder and Stoughton. 8s. 6d. net.
"The Green Lady," By Violet Tweedale. Herbert Jenkins. 7s, 6d. net, If Mr. James Hilton is really, as the publisher's note informs us, 18 years of age (Miss Opal Whiteley has made us rather suspicious of these youthful works), "Catherine Herself" is an interesting and promising performance. Such an age disarms criticism. It is a time of life when no writer is original and all are the prey of influences. Each chapter of - the novels one writes in that year is, as arulo, the product of a different literary inspiration. So it is the most natural thing in the world that the first two or three pages of "Catherine Herself" should be "after? Miss Dorothy Richardson (or, more probably. "Mary Oliver''), and that after that Mr. Hilton should forget all about this style and not refer to it again, And, of course, it is a style generally regarded as particularly suitable for describing the impressions young infants, who are reduced by ennui to counting the brass knobs on their cot-rails, so that when Catherine emerges from the cot her biographer naturally becomes more coherent. He (one is told by the publisher that it is he, in the teeth of considerable evidence to the contrary) has a very good crisp style of his own—a really remarkably excellent style for 18. And, out of the 94 chapters, only 19 end with a row of dots—a creditably small proportion, if it was inventional, but if seems more probable that Mr. Hilton overlooked the five other chapters. One misses these dots, once one is used to them. The plain full stop makes one feel aggrieved, as if a door had been shut in one's face. The story is of Catherine, who fell in love with her music master and was by him inspired with musical genius, which, when he married another out of prudence, fizzled out and left her incapable of earning her living by her playing any more. It is cleverly told, though the psychology. has flaws. Verreker is the rude and ugly man of genius who fascinates women. He loves Catherine, but despises her character, so marries Helen. This is, to say the least of it, improbable. The book has a thousand crudenesses: it is derivative, ofter affected, often tiresome. But it is, all the same, the work of a clever person, a person who, to use the jargon of the reviewers, may be worth watching. For it is quite possible that Mr. Hilton may be going to be able to write.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.