Current Literature
ANTHONY ADVERSE By Hervey Allen Anthony Adverse (Gollanez, 10s. 6d.) is the story of a man's life, from his conception to his death: His childhood and his youth are spent in Leghorn, first in a convent, then as an apprentice in the counting-house of an exiled English merchant. The rest of his life is distributed over half the globe ; the West Indies, Africa, England, France, Spain, and various parts of America. He is involved in half a dozen occupations, from finance to, slaving, and acquits himself in them with as much success as he does in the love affairs which his various headquarters offer. - His exploits are described in detail and generally with vividness, and the majority of the characters he encounters are well drawn and credible. Had Mr. Allen been content with writing a novel of adventure, it is probable, despite the fact that the linking of his episodes is ingenious rather than inevitable, that he would have written a good one. He has tried to do more, and, by the introduction of matter at once extraneous to adventure and intrinsically trivial, has sacrificed the unity of his book as an adventure Story without approaching success in a more ambitious order. Currents of philosophy and symbolism flow through the book, and throw a deposit of pseudo-poetical verbiage on the banks of Mr. Allen's narrative. His style, workmanlike and personal when he is dealing with adventure, that is to say with the exterior aspects of people and places, becomes turgid and derivative as soon as he leaves it to probe for motive or to follow association ; at its worst it is a patchwork of the manners of half a dozen other writers, few of them estimable models. One cannot speak of the form of a book of 1,272 pages, which appears to have no imaginative compulsion beyond the author's perseverance in threading a protracted chronological sequence. It remains -to add that the book is repulsively bound and untidily printed : it provides the only instance known to the present reviewer of a book parting with its binding before he had finished reading it.
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