The title of Mr, F. Brett Young's new novel, ''The Black Diamond'' (Collins, 7s. 6d. -net) has a twofold significance in respect of the hero; it indicates his occupation workman, and his quality as a man. To both the novel does justice artistically. Mr. Brett Young presents the circumstance of the iminer's life as if 1t had been long and leisurely under his eye. There is no suggestion, on the one hand, of vamping, on the other hand of laborious study, in the pictures of its toil or its recreations, its fairs, football, whippet-races, pubs, poaching; affrays. From out this natural background the figure of Abner Fellows emerges wilh the values true.
To call Abner a fine character would be misleading; not because of his weaknesses, which are of \the flesh, and represented in his relations with Susan, but because his strength of the spirit seems to a possession independent of himself, a matter of grace. His is a noble nature, let us rather say, te whom there comes ti vice in succession the occasion, which he accepts, of undertaking the responsibility of a household whose proper head proves useless. That, the doubled situation, first with Alice, then with Mary, produces little effect of strain on the reader is proof of the reserve, without Toss of frankness, with: which the author handles it-
Mr. Brett Young in his books so far has seemed to hover between pure realism and: something more fanciful and fantastic, and though jhe comes down here on the side of the first, his later manner, the graces of the other and earlier are not lacking. The episode of Marion Prosser is no less an illustration of this blend than of his quick touch in the portraiture of women. There is no novelist whose work has been fuller of igh promise as well as of various performance than Mr. Brett Young, and the present book extends his reach in both.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.