LONG ODDS.* THIS is a disappointing book, in more respects
than one. To begin with, the reader who is led to suppose from the antipodean aspect of the volume and the place of publication that he is about to enjoy a still unhackneyed sensation in the shape of a genuine Australian novel, will speedily be undeceived. There is nothing Australian about the story except the title-page and the last scene, and there is no very palpable reason why the last scene should be laid in Australia, after all. The hero, it is true, is an Australian, young, wealthy, impulsive, open-hearted, and little versed in the ways of this wicked world—and it is a very wicked world that we live in, according to Mr. Clarke—but that is all. The scene is laid in England throughout ; youth, wealth, and ingenuousness are not exclusively Australian attributes, and small as is the part really played in the story by the one Austra- lian, Bob Calverley, he might just as well have been a born Englishman for all we can see. The fact seems to be simply that Mr. Clarke, desirous of parading his knowledge of English social and political life, and ventilating his theories with regard to the same, resolved to do so by means of a novel, and hence Long Odds. We cannot complain on general principles if Mr. Clarke or any other Australian see fit to impart to his fellow-colonists, through the medium of a work of fiction, the knowledge of the mother country which travel or a course of reading may have enabled him to acquire. But we must demur to the plea put forth by the author of Long Oddc, in reply to the criticisms of those who had looked for an Australian story in the Australian magazine in which it originally appeared, and had been disap- pointed. " Geoffrey Hamlyn," says Mr. Clarke, " is the best Australian novel that has been, and probably ever will, be written, and any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with that admirable story." Mr. Clarke certainly does not take a hopeful view of the prospects of indigenous Australian literature at this rate. The fact is, we suspect, that he considers the bent of his genius to fit him for subjects of a far higher nature than those com- prised in the ordinary stock-in-trade of Australian story-tellers,- the fortunes of diggers and the rights of squatters ; the habits and morals of aboriginal savages and exotic criminals ; the health of sheep and the anatomy of ornithorhynci ; and such like. Nor will he condescend to depend for the interest of his tale on the lights and shades or loves and hatreds of colonial domestic life. So he dismisses Australian matters altogether with a curt and half- contemptuous apology, and proceeds to his higher mission,—the exposition to the Australian public of a moving panorama of English life in the nineteenth century. Australians can now learn at the mouth of an Australian witness all about English statesmen, diplomatists, money-lenders, peers, lodgiughouse- keepers, officials, jockeys, dowagers, guardsmen, grocers' assist- ants, club-loungers, hell-keepers, Saturday reviewers, Tory squires, and Radical manufacturers ; about cathedral-town society, and beery frequenters of workmen's music-halls ; the mani- pulation of political parties and the management of elections ; the chat of flaneurs, and the gossip of theatres ; scenes in the hunting-field, and coups on the turf ; about bigamy, murder, and seduction, and all the crimes and vices peculiar to the English upper classes ; in fact, about quidyuid agent hontines in every department of life. And we regret to say that Mr. Clarke's impression of English life and manners is not favourable. According to him, English statesmen are pompous idiots or unscrupulous tricksters ; the aristocracy are selfish, callous, and treacherous; the lower classes brutal and degraded ; while the intermediate stratum of society is tainted by ineradicable coarseness of taste and vulgarity. Such, at least, is the only conclusion his readers can form from the cha- racters placed before them by him as representatives of their respective classes. Indeed, we are inclined to doubt whether the
• Long Odds. A Novel. By:Marcus Clarke. Illustrated by Thomas Carrington. Melbourne. Clarion and Co. 1$69.
Australian hero is properly compensated, after all, by the £100,000 he wins on the turf, and the heiress whose hand he gains, for the terrible demoralization his ingenuous nature must have suffered from contact with such an astounding amount of vice, villany, and hypocrisy, during his stay in England. Mr. Clarke may be sincere but misinformed, or only reckless and sensational, but there is not much danger in either case of any large proportion of our Australian cousins taking his unpleasant account without the necessary grain of salt.
As we have said, this is a disappointing book. The English reader is disappointed at not getting an Australian tale, he ought to be disappointed at finding that Mr. Clarke thinks so badly of him and his countrymen, and on its literary merits it is continually disappointing expectation. It reads as if the plots of half-a-dozen London Journal stories had been rolled into one, and fitted with dialogue, and allusive social and moral reflections, by a writer of considerable literary " smartness," with a heavy hand for laying on colour, and possessed, to a remarkable extent, of a knack of literary imitation,—of adopting, with more or less success, all the literary artifices and mannerisms respectively characteristic of the promi- nent novelists of the day. For example, he often employs, occasionally with effect, a very favourite bit of machinery first used by Mr. Disraeli, that of retaining a party of subsidiary characters whose duty it is, during the progress of the story, to assemble when called upon, at any time and in any place, and to interchange epigrammatic remarks from their respective points of view upon the situation. The author of Guy Livingstone is frequently placed under contribution for certain peculiar trickeries of his style—in describing, for example, a mighty hero of the rouge-et-noir table, or in contemptuously analyzing the morbid feelings of a " greasy, pimply " grocer's assistant, who dreams poetry, talks socialism, and secretly loves the lodging- housekeeper's daughter, who has been wronged by one aristocratic villain and plotted against by another. The mental embarrass- ments of an intending bigamist are described with a delicacy and consideration worthy of the very chief of the writers who have made such themes their study. Here and there we trace palpable attempts to imitate Mr. Trollope in his delicate touches of social byplay ; but Mr. Clarke's hand is far too heavy for that sort of thing, though the embarrassment of the grocer's assistant, who has been befooled into acting as an electioneering spy, on finding his best coat cutting him under the arms during an awkward interview with his chief, is well drawn. Mr. Shirley Brooks has evidently furnished the models for Mr. Clarke's more ambitious dialogue, and the murder scene is in Mr. Dickens' most approved style of treatment for such matters. The political part of the story is in the main clumsy and confused, though not without certain moderately good scenes, for the prin- cipal actor in which the idea of a second-rate Vivian Grey, with low cunning in the place of imaginative audacity, seems to have been his aim. The hunting scenes are after the fashion of those in Mr. Sponge's Tour. When Mr. Clarke for the nonce throws aside his imitative art, and fairly lets himself out in his own style of action and at his own pace, as be does when moralizing on the perverse and often purposeless villany of the imaginary world he has peopled, he shows considerable talent of a very un- pleasant kind for moral diagnosis, and an occasional capacity for vigorous, though to jerky, writing. Putting aside the palpable animus of the writer against English society,— partly expressed and partly veiled under affected cynicism,— the exaggerated moral colouring, and the preposterous con- geries of London Journal plots which form its basis, there is much which is readable in Long Odds. We cannot express a belief that the world would be benefited or even profitably amused by the perusal of works of this character, but we can quite fancy Mr. Clarke capable of something considerably less open to objec- tion and more calculated to entertain his readers if he would give them a little less gloomy picture of English life, and trust more to his own native powers than to that of cunning imitation. Or if his mind has been thoroughly relieved by his scathing exposure of the rottenness of English society, let him give us an Australian novel, with good local colouring, and just one, or, at the most two, English villains to serve as a foil to the happy and simple-hearted Southerners by whom it would be mainly peopled.
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