"Retavions." By Sir Harry H. Johnston, London: Chatto and Windus, Pp. 206. 7s. 64.
To read one of Sir Harry Johnston's remarkable novels is like keeping company with a pleasant, gentle, and easy-going ghost (writes T. M. in the "Manchester Guardian"). Or, if that sounds too unflattering and hardly human, let us est that each of them is a re~ ation of the sort of novel written when James Payn was king and best-seller; and "Relations," Sir Harry's latest, is the most de-rightfully. eighteen-eighty ish of them all. The naivete and ingennonsness of the technique are very striking in an age of technical Phistication. The tense of the rative is made to change from past present in the happy-go-lucky wey that writers had in the days of yore. But Sir Harry has done the incredible thing inspire (or because) of what now seem crus dities and amateurish misjudgements; he has given life to his story. of a young Australian who by of successful jewel-mining is able to marry into the British aristocracy, but finds his position by, no means as attractive as he expected it to be, when he has a new group of impecunious and harassing relations added to his own, beginning to feel rather overdone with relations, on my aide as well fas yours. "All: the' great thinkers and fern to sound an ati 4 of large families
lations, entangling. us in. all their bus 5 wearying Us with their difference Talthy oF something oF other So mellow and easy is the flow of the story that we find ourselves beaming on Sir Harry's principal though they were all decent men and women instead of being mainly, bounders—especially Rupert, osten. sibly the hero, but revealed in his true colours when he gives the most brutal and worldly advice to a young engineer who is so dependent. on his favour that he can't afford to knock him down. The period of the novel is that beginning at the turn of the present century, but we can hardly believe that the insufferable adviser.would have been thank far his outpouring of wisdom "Relations" has a lot of the same brand of wisdom, but it is sublimate. ed by an old-world courtliness and free-and-easy charm which obvious ly belong less to the characters than to their creater,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.