"Woodsmohe.", By F. Brett Young, (Collins, 7s. €4.)
It is less by breaking new ground than by working over again familiar materials to which his hand is dis ciplined, that Mr. Brett Young has achieved: this entertaining story. Entertainment is distinctly its impulse: there is no sense of creation, as in those other African studies of the Crescent Moon" and "Pilgrim's Rest." One of the figuros—the neurotic Rawley—is repulsive enough and in a sense tragic, but since we know from the outset that the tragedy is to fall mainly upon his own head, that does not disturb the reader's serenity. And, talking} of what is known from the outeat, one would like to protest against a publisher's jacket whose _pietute takes the edge off the crisis by showing how that crisis is to be The attractive, but self-diseiplined woman, the pitiful and half. demented husband, and the chilval-Tous soldier—it is only the accom. plished novelist who would venture conventional ingle." But the to build his theme upon such a very
treatment never becomes otiose, nor is interest slackened by recollection of the very similar situation in Mr. Masefield's "Captain Margaret." Mrs. Rowley, as the "tragic bride," is invested poetry as well as charm: Captain Antrim, moving unconsciously under the stimulus of sex attraction, is true to the naivete of his type; and Rowley drees his sreitd with all dramatic propriety, The ghost business at the end. is rather gratuitously sprung upon the reader—and ghosts that are" not!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.