THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

READERS of "Hatter's Castle," the novel which created so favorable a reaction when published last year, will find in "Three Loves" an amplification rather than a development of the characteristics of that volume. This applies to its defects as well as its merits. In fact so similar are they in temper, and in the manner in which the tragedy is developed as a "satire of circumstance" that one suspects that "Three Loves" was written before rather than after "Batter's Castle" and prepared for publication on the strength of the previous success.

Superficially, the story of the book springs from the social conflict between the Irish immigrants living in Scotland, and the native Scots, though the equation of antagonistic stocks is quickly abandoned for the familiar and more personal geometry of the triangle. "Three Loves" is really the story of a woman whose impulsive nature is excited into jealousy by an ambiguous though fundamentally innocent relationship between her husband and his cousin. The manner in which one such ambiguity generates another, and ends by alienating the heroine from her husband, from her son, and finally from the religion in which she has taken refuge, is distinctly suggestive of the manner of Thomas Hardy. Dr. Cronin's literary sojourn in Wessex is perhaps the most important of the several influences to be detected in his work. It appears not only in the implicit irony of his tale, but also in the "tendency to take his vocabulary for an airing." Such redundant phrases, frequently occurring, as "protested the impossibility of such omission," and "immeasurable adulation gushed from her generous bosom" are not only bad writing: they are a kind of bad writing which went out a generation ago, and there is little excuse for reviving it today.

Prolixity, in fact is the word which best sums up "Three Loves," the words are too long; the sentences are pompous, and the length of the tales as a whole defeats any impression of unity which the reader might draw from it. These defects tend to obscure the genuine merits of a novel which has a strong grip on the analysis of character, a flair for sombre narrative, and an ability to reveal the clash of kindred temperaments, which is a more welcome heritage from the author of "Jude the Obscure," than the allusive and deliberate style.