ABSTRACT
The Genius and the Goddess, being neither successful nor (one hopes at least) ambitious, hardly raises the problem at all, except in so far as one opens it with a certain hope and excitement. But there is only the spectacle of a slicked-up Mr. Huxley managing adroitly that cumbersome form the interrupted soliloquy, with two old cronies, or rather one and an echo, talking through the evening about an old love affair. With the first words Mr. Huxley sticks his neck out, for he lays down a law and promptly breaks it. 'The trouble with fiction,' said John Rivers, 'is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.' 'The criterion of reality,' he goes on to say, 'is its intrinsic irrelevance.' After that anti-fictional blast you expect at least a whiff of intrinsic irrelevance, some escape from a routine plot and hackneyed fictional characters. But no: Mr. Huxley gives us a situation as contrived and almost as stately as a minuet, a dance of force and counterforce exactly matched, action, reaction, and finally an accident as opportunely placed to kill off unwanted characters as galloping consumption used to be, or, more recently, angina pectoris. The genius is that old fictional favourite the half-wit intellectual, the absent-minded professor so brilliant he cannot tie his own bootlaces, the goddess that other fictional standby, the earth-mother-barmaid, beautiful and amused and sensual and unexacting; and the pattern of their behaviour is mapped out by every fictional precedent till the car accident, relevant with a vengeance, sorts their destinies neatly out. The whole thing is far more readable, far
