Minvale. By Onus Agnus. (Hodder and Stoughton. Cs.) —Although "
Orme Agnus" is as much at home in writing of a strike of North Country operatives as of the politics of a small village, the peculiar charm of his earlier books was largely due to their rural setting, which is inevitably absent in his new story. To tell the truth, he seems to write from the inside when he writes of rural life, and from the outside when he writes of urban struggles. It is not that the characters in this book are not well drawn, but they are just a little commonplace. The story of the struggle is vividly written, and the riots over the evictions—the millowner being also the owner of the houses round—is very movingly told. But the final catastrophe is rather clumsily managed. It is really too easy a solution of the difficulty for one of the strikers practically to murder the millowner. Slayter does not actually die, but he becomes idiotic, and the management of the village falls into the hands of his daughter and her clergyman lover, who immediately, and very justly, concede all the operatives' demands. It is to be hoped that " Orme Agnus" will return in his next book to his earlier methods, and give us further proof of his wonderful insight into rural nature.
Previous page
