NOVELS.
RED STAR OF NIGHT.*
ME. MACKENZIE is to be congratulated, not only on his story, but on the opportuneness of its publication. This is not the weather for complicated psychological problem novels —which impose a strain on the mental faculties. Alike for those who are lucky enough to be holiday making and for those who are immured in London, a lighter fare is desirable ; something which does not give one profoundly to think, but conduces to the facile passage of the sultry hours ; and here we have it in a most palatable form in the shape of a " sensation novel condensed " of the most exhilarating type, packed full of excitement, yet with an agreeable literary flavour too often lacking in the crude inventions of our modern thaumaturgists of the pen. In this respect and in the fantastic wildness of the adventures portrayed Mr. Mackenzie derives from R. L. Stevenson— the Stevenson of the New Arabian Nights—but his discipleship is not that of "the sedulous ape" or the slavish imitator: be has qualities which lend his work freshness and individuality. There is something very engaging, for instance, in the notion of the Patriots' Sanatorium, endowed by a romantic Englishman-- a dreamer and fighter who served under Garibaldi—and directed after his death by his sister. There on a Hertford. shire common this good lady received into her home hungry exiles from downtrodden countries and nursed them back to health. The scene at afternoon tea is amusingly de. scribed :— "It was really amusing to see how the Patriots obeyed the old English lady : this one, a Spaniard, taking from her hand his spoonful of emulsion ; that one, a Pole, his cup of bouillon, and Kowalski his glass of patent food. The others took tea and made onslaught on the bread and butter and cakes, and the talk was of 'way-up-among-the-clouds quality. The ordinary . Philistine, whose five o'clock talk is of politics, or horses, or charity bazaars, or the last novel, can have no conception of the rare talk they held ; of course, it was utterly useless, this discoursing of ideals and theories and panaceas, but it was all very fine and very futile. Here, in one of the oldest corners of England, in one of the little spots where feudal feeling still exists, where Tom the cowherd quakes at sight of the lord of the manor and pulls at his top-knot when the lord of the manor's baby goes by, you could hear the • The Red Star of Night. By W. A. Mackenzie. London ; Constable. Va. net.]
most furious Nihilism talked, the most lunatic Tolstoi-ism, the most stupendous Nietzsche-ism, the most undiluted altruism. Over the garden wall English oaks and elms of feudal times raised their green heads ; and the hammer of the slavish English stone- breaker cracked English flints that might have, and possibly did, cut the hoofs of Crusaders' battle-horses ; and the squire's groom went by whistling 'The Lincolnshire Poacher' ; and on this side all the hot heads of Anarchism and Nihilism and Socialism sang their anthems of quintessential altruism, their choruses of uni- versal brotherhood, their pasans of Liberth, Egalite, Fraternite. Such a thing could only be in England."
There is an agreeable audacity, too, in the assigning of the chief villain's role to a distinguished biologist and zoologist, knighted for his services to science, and a prospective Presi- dent of the Royal Society—a man who is not only Jekyll and Hyde, but a quintuple personality with a corresponding genius for disguising his appearance.
Michael Darner, the hero of the story, was a gilded youth of twenty-six, rich, handsome, and the heir-presumptive to a marquisate. But he had no interest in life, and, though sound in wind and limb, was already infected with a devastating ennui which led him to consult a doctor. The doctor's pre- scription was unconventional :— "Go out into the London streets, young man. You will bump into something, or something will bump into you. There's no place in the world like London for adventures. At the door of a theatre, in a restaurant, in one of the tubes, on a 'bus top, anywhere, everywhere, you can begin a comedy, a drama, a tragedy. Very well, take what the gods send you—and hang on to it. Hang on to it, give yourself up to it, let it absorb you, let it obsess you, and in less than a month's time you'll find that you have something to live for and that you are no more bored."
Darner took the advice and at once bumped into a secret society; became a member of it before he knew where he was; fell in love with a charming young lady who was engaged to his own double, a Russian criminal who had murdered his cousin, the heir to the marquisate; was sandbagged and im- prisoned while his double took his place and Mr. Joshua Farmiloe, arch-enemy of society, directed his ingenious plot for securing the immense fortune of the Templemars by killing off all the
members of the family. To say more would be to discount the fearful joys of perusal. We may content ourselves with noting the agreeable relief which is afforded by the scenes from which violence is absent, and the clever sketches of the subsidiary characters such as the American clairvoyant and the amateur and professional detectives.
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