Mr. Neil Gunn, after twenty years in the Civil Service,
suddenly decided to throw up his job and sell his house, and to exchange security for freedom to write end sail his newly- acquired boat. The readers of his other books will know that he had good reason to believe in himself as a writer, but he knew nothing about sailing or petrol engines. He does now. In Of in a Boat (Faber and Faber, los. 6d.) he tells how he and his wife picked up their knowledge by sheer hard experience on a first trip through the Inner Hebrides. There have been recently a lot of books on the same theme, and Mr. Gunn makes no particular variations on it. He made the same mistakes that all novices make when buying a boat, and was deceived in the time-honoured way about the age of the motor. But as a writer he is no novice, and he deals with fairly common- place incidents and often-described places in the Hebrides from a sort of private angle that conveys to the reader the author's feeling that no one had ever sailed in a small boat round Skye, Mull and Eigg before.
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