Traffic. By E. Temple Thurston. (Duckworth and Co. Os.)— It
is seldom one meets with a book so wholly disagreeable as this novel. The subject is one of almost unrelieved gloom, and the reader is not spared the most disgusting physical details, all of which go to make the brutality of the author's scenes thoroughly realistic. The figure of the heroine is not unattractive, but the same cannot be said of any other personage in the book. The hero is merely the palest of shadows, and all the other characters, without exception, are in their different ways exceedingly repulsive. It is difficult to imagine for what purpose such a book is written. Power in writing is certainly an excellent thing, and realism one of the gifts for which modern novel-writers petition the gods, but neither power nor realism lies in a multiplicity of nauseous details, and modern fiction would be greatly improved if authors would only believe that such is the fact.
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