Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3816/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The heroine of Alberta and the Others (Sidgwick and Jackson) was the eldest of an orphaned family of girls and boys who were finding life a little boring in an English village; and when an unexpected legacy made her mistress of a couple of town lots in a place called Sunshine, in Western Canada, nothing would content her but to emigrate with the whole tribe—reinforced by a delightful Aunt Mary and an animal known as the Meritorious Cat—to the Land of Promise. The book is the history of how they got on there. Naturally, from the circumstances of their start and the giddy altitude of Alberta’s hopes, you will be prepared for its being, to some extent at least, a story of disillusion. Miss Madge S. Smith, who wrote it, says that it is all true; and indeed there is much in the tale that stamps it as the outcome of personal experience. This being so, I could that her attitude in the matter had been a little less uncompromisingly English. In many ways the language and general outlook of the daughter of an Oxford don will no doubt differ considerably from that of a Canadian-born inhabitant of a prairie township; but that is no good reason for assuming an air of patronage. However, this defect, though it exists, is not so pronounced as to spoil one's enjoyment of an entertaining record, written, as the publishers say, "in high spirits throughout," and having, I fancy, just this much fiction mingled with its obvious fact, that it ends with a general pairing off and the prospect of three weddings—which seems, as Lady Bracknell observed in a similar connection, "a number considerably above the average that statistics have laid down for our guidance." But at least it is the amende honorable to the Land of Promise.
From the cover of A Tail of Gold (Hodder and Stoughton) I gather with respectful interest that its author, Mr. David Hennessey, recently won four hundred pounds with another story in open competition. I did not read the story in question, but in view of its satisfactory financial result I may be permitted to express a hope that it was considerably better work than the present volume. Let me be entirely fair. A Tail of Gold has some pictures of Australian mining life that are not without interest; but I am bound to add that a careful and sympathetic perusal has failed to disclose any other reason for its existence. The plot, so far as there is one, concerns the chequered career of a certain Major Smart, who seems to have been by no means all that a major should be. Amongst other unpleasing peculiarities, he was apparently possessed of a fetish that brought misfortune or death to all who were associated with him. These results were in the main involuntary; but it is only just to add that Smart was not above assisting nature to take her course. Thus, some years before the opening of the story, he had deliberately buried one poor lady alive in a cave containing sulphide of mercury. Never ask me why. I am as muddled by this as I am over his further conduct in leaving with the corpse every possible clue in the way of letters and ciphers that could bring his guilt home to him. In any ordinary novel he would have been convicted in a few chapters; but A Tail of Gold wags (if I may use the term) so leisurely, and its action is so much impeded by false starts and repetitions and general haphazardness, that there is no telling how long it might not have continued but for the limitations of volume form. No, I can't pretend I liked it much.
Madame Albanesi, in The Cap of Youth (Hutchinson) cannot be accused of excessive kindness to her own sex, for the charming women of the book are almost snuffed out by two poisonous females, Lady Bollington and Lady Catherine Chiltern. Indeed these ladies are a little too much of a bad thing, and, not for the first time, I am left thinking how wonderfully Madame Albanesi's novels might be improved if she could persuade herself to bestow an occasional virtue upon her wicked characters. The heroine, Virginia, escaped from the hands of one of the pair only to fall under the thumb of the other. I must admit, however, that Lady Catherine had some reason to be angry at having Virginia suddenly dumped upon her as a derelict daughter-in-law. Why Brian Chiltern married in haste and then left his wife to endure such impossible conditions you must find out for yourself, but I fancy you will agree that his delicacy of feeling amounted to sheer stupidity. Nevertheless this story is bound to be popular, and I should have had no complaint to make if I did not feel that its author has it in her to do better work.
Even readers to whom American humour is generally a little indigestible may glean some smiles from Penrod (Hodder and Stoughton), provided that it is taken in small doses and not in the lump. If this book were to be considered a study of the normal American boy I should cry with vigour, "Save me from the breed," but as a fanciful account of a thorough and egregious imp of mischief I can, within limits, offer my congratulations to Mr. Booth Tarkington. The triumph of Penrod lies in the fact that, although he brought woe and tribulation to his relations and exasperated his friends to the point of insanity, it is nevertheless impossible to suppress an affection for him. Ofttimes and hard his father chastised him with rods, but Penrod merely accepted these beatings as the price that had to be paid for leading an adventurous life, and showed not the smallest signs of repentance. Yes, I like Penrod, though I have not any great desire to meet him in the flesh. It grieves me, however, that such a character as Mr. Kinosling should have been dragged in by the heels. If fatuous clerics are worth any novelist's attention they certainly are not worth Mr. Tarkington's, and the only effect Mr. Kinosling had upon me was to fortify my conviction that it is far easier to begin a book of humour than to finish it.