Combat and Carnival. By Peter Carew. (Constable. 21s.) Tins is
worth several historical novels. Colonel Carew has, with a light touch and leaving most of the talking to the characters themselves, recorded - his family's history from the French Revolution to the Crimean War. These west-country gentry, the Taylors and Carews, are revealed by their own diaries, letters and recorded chatter against a background of battles, marriages, civil strife, royal occasions and notabilities. Finest of all is the paterfamilias, Sir Walter Carew, a blimp whom one would take for a caricature in fiction, but whose bounce and irascibility are all the more delightful for being real. We see him at one moment chafing at 'that German feller' (the Prince Consort), at the next threatening to boot Gladstone (his fag at Eton thirty-four years before) in the trousers.
Yet all the characters seem larger than life, right down to the minor figures who appear in glimpses for only a page or two: Sir Samuel O'Malley, for instance, the owner of Clare Island, and his driver M'Que, 'a very villainous sort of ruffian.' Or William IV, noisy and pathetic, standing at his coronation with 'the great heavy crown coming down over his eyebrows.' Colonel Carew writes with wit and without cruelty ; and his book is both good social history and good entertainment. A. S. T.
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