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nor polish of style can obscure the boy in Mr. Montague,
who lives a great adventure.
In “Gallions Reach” Mr. Tomlinson also lives a boy’s adventure.
Unlike Mr. Montague his sense of irony is not
sufficiently keen to achieve the effect which he desires to create,
for he is more often facetious than ironical. The adventure
is symbolized in the hero’s meeting with the seductive
Helen at the Gridiron, when an immunity protects him
from experience. This same immunity envelopes him even
after he murders his employer and stays with him throughout
all perils, including shipwreck and the jungle. It is only
in the last paragraph that the reader learns that Colet has
been pursued by ghosts which beckon him back to London
to face a charge of murder.
In his choice of words Mr. Tomlinson is the youngest
writer of the group under review. Red and green are still
ruby and emerald to his imagination; the blue of the sea
can only be described as sapphire, drops of water as
“globules of cold silver,” and storm clouds as “the colour
of calamity.” This poverty of style is occasionally more
than balanced by fine descriptions, such as one of nightfall
in the jungle or the scene in the Gridiron restaurant.
More distinguished still is the passage in which he describes
the fevered terror of the hero when lost in a jungle storm.
One wonders why a novelist who can produce so fine a passage
as this one, cannot have made more of the material of
shipwreck. One remembers two recent descriptions of shipwreck
that one supposes would be labelled by a novelist as
casual: they are Lady Rhondda’s account of the sinking of
the Lusitania and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s account of
the sinking of the Persia. Described from entirely different
angles, both of these simple narratives leave the reader with
the illusion of having passed through the experience of shipwreck,
an experience which is at the same time physical and
spiritual. Somehow, in “Gallions Reach,” there exists, with
the few exceptions one has already noted, a hiatus between
