DELIVERANCE
Deliverance. By E. L. Grant Watson. 12mo. 322 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
LIFE and the sane way to live it form the theme of Grant Watson's novels. Deliverance is the third book he has written in illustration of his profound belief that men and women, in order to find vital expression, must cast off all philosophies and systems, those "signs of a failing vitality," and live with individual desire as a guide to the realization of life. In the preface to his first book he says:
"Life can survive all bludgeoning provided that the individual soul is so violently shaken that all its old valuations fall completely away. Out of the ruins, life naked and without shame, but beautiful in that naked vitality, can rise to new expression."
Surely he has tested his theory, for it would be difficult to find any writer who has brought more naked, effortless vitality to the making of stories of lives that break and then find a way to tranquillity through a reconstructed faith in life. As to his starting point he has come to human problems over a road new to novelists. He is a zoologist, and after he had taken honours in natural science at Cambridge, spent a year in an ethnological expedition in Australia. Then he went to the Fiji Islands and studied animal and vegetable life from as close a range as a man may win to. Suddenly he came out of the bush with a desire to write about people. He has given up his other work, though for that matter he has brought much of it over bodily into his three books, Where Bonds Are Loosed, The Mainland, and Deliverance.
In the first story, a man and a twice-broken woman struggle through suffering to a happiness compatible with nature. The second book gives the same conflict in the life of their son. It is not so difficult for him because he has grown to manhood away from the herd and its flock morality. But he must go over to the mainland and learn for himself that life is best in forests where
