Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE BERMONDSEY BOOK
One wonders what idea she had when she started writing. Had she,
one summer's night looked at the immensity of the starry sky and thought
how minute a creature is man compared to the infinity of time. Man, a
speck, to whom one day of Jehovah's time is a hundred million years; that
should have been the theme of the book but it is not.
True, all through 491 pages is the contrast of the futile struggles of
mankind compared to the vastness of time, but there she has failed. Her
people are not the little atoms of matter she intended them to be, they are,
in varying degrees, intensely alive, so alive in fact that they gradually
dominate time instead of being dominated by it.
Peregrine Wood, Professor and Savant, wrapped in a world of abstruse
mathematics; and Ann, his wife, with her gift of second sight, are people of
the author's imagination; their feet are of clay, but it is not quite earthly
clay
Ḣilary, their airman son, is a dragon-fly, darting, swooping, far above
the earth in which he has no interest. The description of him as a type is
perfect. "He was alert and perfectly still. He seemed to her to be balanced
like the needle of a compass, but he seemed too like a weapon charged with
explosive, like a loaded rifle."
Patrick O'Hagen, lover and beloved of Ann, and Peregrine's friend is
the fourth important character. A man out of sympathy whh the machinemade
world in which he lives, interested only in living creatures, his life is
a struggle for simplicity in an artificial world.
The cleverest characters are the lesser ones. Carrie Whitaker, a Society
woman, but in reality a captive fish in an aquarium, who assumes that
because she can see nothing beyond her tank that there is nothing beyond.
Rose Kimberley, who believes she too is in the aquarium and a leader of a
multitude of small fish when in reality she is an animal, wild and untamed,
to whom the freedom of the prairie makes a constant appeal.
The humorous and tragic story of these people ends in a crisis, out of all
proportion to their importance in Jehovah's Day.
One is left with a feeling of bewilderment, as though one has been
watching a brilliant story unfold itself at the cinema, but which is hopelesslymixed
with another and quite different type of film, equally, if not more,
brilliant.
D. W.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED.
JOSEPH AND His BRETHREN: by H. W. Freeman (Chatto & Windus).
POINT COUNTER POINT: by Aldous Huxley (Chatto & Windus).
THE OLD AND THE YOUNG: by Luigi Pirandello (Chatto & Windus).
ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: by Lytton Strachey (Chatto & Windus).
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