New Novels
CASSANDRA. By Reginald Berkeley. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)— By way of inducing in the human sluggard a less hazy perspec- tive of this insensate world of ours Captain Berkeley has hit upon the ingenious idea of transporting his characters—and the reader's imagination—several thousand years forward in space-time. It is the twentieth-century equivalent of the roof-peeping devil device of Lesage, who indeed was simply concerned to show up the moral and petty social follies of his fellow-countrymen. Mr. Berkeley, as befits the age in which we live, bestrides the political, which is to say the international, stage. Colonel Anderson, M.P., finds himself the unwilling legatee of the secret—and the relevant papers—of a psychic friend. Appalled by the nature of the World Crisis and triumph of Leninism, as reconstructed there, he feels himself thenceforth to be a man with a mission. If England can be forewarned of the terrible things in store, surely there is a hope of cheating Fate ? He seeks to impress on Parliament, on the various political leaders, the urgent need for a truce to party manoeuvres and a National Government disposed to guide British policy away from the Old and in the direction of the New World. But they will not listen to him. In America he is similarly rebuffed, his " story " only appreciated by film magnates, and he returns home, only to be cornered by Home Office delegates and alienists who would have put him in a strait-waistcoat had not a friend given them to understand that the man's behaviour was due, not to " political eccen- tricity," but simply to " private cupidity " 1 A few weeks ago •this delicious and exhilarating satire might have been written down as a politician's nightmare after a diet of Jeans and Spengler. But now ? The book should be widely read. It is full of shrewd observation by a man who has retained a fresh, untrammelled mind. Readers may well, however, begin at page seventy.
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