Revotvution. By J. D. Beresford.
(Collins. 7s. 6d. net.)
The beginning of Mr. Beresford's "Revolution" is more exciting than the whole of his last two or three novels. It tingles, and sets you tingling as you read. In this rather hand-to-mouth business of life, could anything be more exhilarating than to rediscover oneself and the world? That is what Paul Leaming does, after five years of pleasant apathy following his war experiences. During that time he had been treated by his father and sister as one who must be spared all distresses, though he himself knew towards the end of the period that he could face life og a sound man. When he does wake from his lulled content (into which, rather improbably, no sound of the disjointed world seems to have come) he finds England on the edge of a general strike. The life to which he has returned is astir with conflict, and he is aware that he is "'different" since the war. We confess to an almost desperate attention to Paul's movement so far. "Different"—when so many people seem just the same, fonly more so!
There is a chance of enlightenment. And the things we in our immediate moment dread er hope for (according to our temper or convictions) are in Paul's day reaching their testing-point.
To get his Revolution going Int. Beresford must use some rather dull material—the "political situation" has to be explained and the stage set. It is quietly and deftly done, but it draws us a little apart from' Paul. It is the machinery of life, not life itself, that begins to catch him, and though it may be argued that the machinery is life in-its modern manifestations, the hope and newness of Paul's awake ing become a little dulled, simply because the things he finds waiting for him are our own preoccupations. There is delicate, firm record of Paul's perceptions, as he sides, and the beauty of the world—the beauty
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.