DAWN ON MONT BLANC. Wilfrid Benson. (Hogarth Press. 7s. 6d.)—Roger
Maiteland went straight from Cam- bridge to an appointment on the staff of the International Institute of Racial Peace at Veagen. Yes, that was just the trouble—if we are to assume, as we must, that this story takes its tone, and specifically its central figure, from the author himself. FOr there is, a certain shallowness of interest in the setting, slid a pedestrian quality in the telling which not merely make Roger Maiteland ' an aggravating young man," as we are forewarned in the sub-title, but which give a wholly unreal focus to the picture of League of Nations society at Geneva 'which is here thrown on the screen. The author penetrates—with a zeal worthy of a better cause—into the more trivial side of the life of an international civil service, characterizes his male figures with some success within the narrow limits imposed, and conveys well enough the all- pervading monotony of a career which tears up mercilessly each national official from his roots and leaves him high and dry through lack of his natural background. But Mr. Benson's characters are futile and depressing persons—his women, in particular, much over-drawn, and the dialogue as often tiresome as clever. Altogether, the book contains just enough truth to make those who know Geneva resentful and aggrieved, and to give those who do not know Geneva an entirely false idea of the human drama being played out on this international stage. One sighs for Miss Macaulay's extravaganza. The present reviewer, after reading this unworthy successor to The Foreigner in the Family, is reminded of the contention of the higher officials of the Secretariat (if not the B.I.T.) that the type of man required for a GeneVa post is first and fore- most one who has knocked about the world a good deal—not, emphatically not, " a suburban young man."
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