TIDEMARKS. By H. M. Tomlinson. '(Cassail. 12s. 6d.) THERE is
a certain tediousness inherent in books of travel— a tediousness which is latent all the time, but which only shows its head when the writer allows himself to wander from plain fact. Indeed, nothing is harder than to write a discur- sory book of travel, and yet avoid this tediousness. Mr. Tomlinson certainly does not avoid it ; his account of "a journey to the beaches of the Moluccas and the forests of Malaya in 1923" is mercilessly padded. He is as ready as any Victorian papa of fiction, cast on a desert island, to deduce the marvellous ways of God from the tumbling of a coconut. No occasion comes amiss to him for moralizing ; he exudes the exasperating complacency of the Philosopher Looking at Life. All this would be very well if Mr. Tomlinson really was a philosopher ; had anything of the least interest to say about Life and God ; could deduce anything at all original from his coconut. But in his discursions he never once says any- thing of spiritual or intellectual interest. On the other hand, tie him down to actual descriptions of the husk of the coco- nut, and he is excellent. His passages descriptive of the cowl of the Red Sea could hardly be improved, and make fascinating reading. If only he would stick to that, and not keep digres- sing into pages of the" And now we see from that, dear children," type ; if only fie would confine himself to impressing one with the heat of the Gulf of Aden, and give up trying to impress one with the breadth of his own intellect ; if only, in short, he would emulate the style of the "directions for the navigation of the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the central track for steam vessels through the Red Sea, Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden," which he professes to admire, his book would be half its present length, it is true, but it would be very much more worth reading than it is at present, and would give one a far greater respect for Mr. Tomlinson.
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