The Great Proconsul. By Sidney C. Grier. (W. Blackwood and
Sons. 6s.)—It is difficult to imagine what induced Mr. Grier deliberately to throw " this book into the form of fiction," and then as deliberately warn the " ordinary novel reader " of the extreme boredom which he will find within its covers. The only excuse for dealing with history in the form of fiction is when it is so done that an especially vivid picture is given of the sort of life which was led by persons at the particular date which has been chosen. It is absurd to use fiction to make a history-book " readable," for the student finds all well-written histories readable. And if Mr. Grier chose fiction in order that people who read novels might not miss his book, why does he warn them off on the first page in terms which are not entirely courteous? It must be confessed that the minute details of political history in this book spoil it as a novel, while the slight uncertainty which always torments the reader of a "true story" as to whether anything which is true has been sacrificed to artistic effect spoils it as a history. Anglo- Indians whose recollection of the history of "John Company" is getting a little rusty will perhaps read the book with pleasure, but they would probably have preferred the fiction element left out. No one, however, who does not know something of, and care more for, the history of India in the late eighteenth century will find any interest in the book at all. Mr. Grier gives us fairly vivid pictures of Warren Hastings and his wife, and contrives to invest the book with an atmosphere of eighteenth-century India in which it is possible to believe. But it is to be hoped that in his next book Mr. Grier will choose either history or fiction, and not give us a mixture in which neither element is of the first quality.
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