ABSTRACT
The beginning is the most difficult part, for there are several rather august digressions, and the characters, described so fully, turn out all to be minor ones. Also the method by which the affairs of a great many people are described simultaneously necessitates the introduction of the whole of the orchestra at once, a rather bewildering confusion. Essen tially a satirist, the author succeeds best with the characters he has borrowed and the situations he has observed. The wide scope of the novel, however, and its elaborate construction tend to make him tres pass on the domains of other writers, and one is being perpetually sur prised by these resemblances. The clever, sensitive woman managing her home and dealing with a thoughtless husband and an adoring lover, the rather shy-making tea party wit, Mr. Sita Ram, in Bombay, suggest two obvious authors, while other passages even resemble Mr. Gals worthy and Mr. Maurice Baring. The novel is mainly the picture of a group of people; the author seems most interested in their intellects if they have intellects, and, failing that, in their attitudes to sex and, if they are capable of it, to intimacy. There is also a novelist writing a novel about the other characters, and we are given some interesting extracts from his diary. In one of these he schemes to write a novel about a novelist, and to illustrate the themes from analogies to be made in an aquarium with deep-sea fishes. The Faux-Monnayeurs of Gide is exactly this method, even down to the analogies with deep-sea fishes.
