Puornney—By Gilbert new novel by Gilbert Cannan Neways the publication of a event. For he hes Unis distinction, that whereas all his arty contempur the band of young men who started novels at the same time, have sooner or later disappointed us of their carly promise, his work alone has held to the standard of his earliest thing to ry And. writing. In these days that is som
wen if Gilbert Cannan has not fulfilled the expectations aroused by his early work, it is, in the present arid state of the art, something of a triumph that he has never fallen short of hhis frst achievements. In this his latest book he gives us the brilliant flashes of insight, the clear} cut expression of unrecognized #2- {cial truths that we Tearned to expect from him, fresh, interest ing, stimulating, At the same time they are set in the same incompleteners, incoherence, which we have {gone on hoping (for some years) now) would disappear from his' work and give place to.a continuity of thought, a smoothly finished vehicle, It seemed so much " sign of impatient youth that we assumed 8 finish of constructive thought must develop with experience. But no constructive finish has developed, and hope of it begins to loose its' grip, He xerus to be permanently uninterested in the ordinary things.
cannot be bothered with the bricks and mortar of life. How. then, can we expect construct His refence would probably be "I! am doing the lighting, not the bricklaying." And to the retort "You are! putting very brilliant lights in very junusual- places" he would reply "They are illuminating corners the house of life which you would never otherwise see," And we might as well let him have the last word, {since we have nothing left but the'
other flimsy-taunt that the medium lin hardly the correct one. Woo. shall define the limits of the novel form in these days?
amounts to this: that while Gilbert-Cannan continues to flash the) light of his genius upon the unusual, the extra normal, we will have to) excuse him not giving us a coherent story or even comprehensive character. For there is the same haphazard incompleteness in his char-eater drawing as in his seneral construction. He gives us only the unusual. In order to visualize the complete personality the reader has to) supply the ordinary aspects of the character from his own experience. For to take what Gilbert Cannan tells of a man of 2 woman as a comprehensive description would be like judging the average, kindly householder solely upon his behaviour at breakfast on Monday morning.
No. It is not his story nor his characters that matter. It is his attitude towards life and the times) which he uses his characters to demonstrate.- He will not subside into the usual acceptance of things as right because they exist or are done. Of the 19th century he says:
"There was a nightmarish quality about it all, about the completely hypnotized acceptance of everything that was said, thought and done as perfection:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.