PREM. By H. K. Gordon. (Arnold. 7s. 6d.) PRE.M NARMN'S
is the eternal tragedy of the Indian zamindur, Striving to keep up appearances in his village; he lived beyond his means, and fell incontinently into the toils of a villainous money-lender. Thereafter, pursued by Nemesis-cum-Dyarchy, . poor Prem slips by facile descent on to evil days and evil ways. The author does not show us that universal, multi-coloured India which the naphtha flare of Kipling's genius has illumined with uncanny brilliance, nor Flora Annie Steel's Hindustan of the fascinatingly gigantic and magnificent Moghuls with their cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces, their exquisite temples and their faery Shaliraars ; but a drabber, vaster and more permanent India, the India of the toiling millions on the soil, whose slow reaction to the reverberations' of religious, political and racial emotienskilfully blended-bythe agitators to their particular palate—has already been revealed with such sympathetic insight in Edmund Candler's Siri Ram. In the path of that classic—limpingly, it must be said—Mr. Gordon has elected to tread. Unhappily his book is marred by an obtrusive special pleading. It opens with finely drawn - portraiture of rural environment ; lapses rapidly, and for the greater part of its pages, into an indictment of the Montagu- Chelmsford Reforms ; and resolves, in its final chapters, into a melodramatic and inconclusive detective story. nevertheless, Mr. Gordon's description—except in embar- rassed love moments—is vivid, vigorous, distinguished, even powerful. It may be predicted with certainty that when he has discriminated between art and propaganda we shall hear more of him.
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