ABSTRACT
Two things are remarkable in Mr. Huxley's new book: the method and the moral. The method is what first strikes the reader with surprise; the time-scheme is confused in a bewildering fashion: for ten pages we are in 1933, then for half a dozen in 1902, thence we jump to 1926, after twenty pages we find ourselves in 1912, and a little later we are back where we started. 'The cinema,' say Mr. Huxley's publishers, 'has accustomed people to the use of similar methods.' The cinema, it is true, telescopes, it omits, it speeds time up and slows it down, and gives a bird's-eye view, as it were, of simultaneous happenings-but it does not turn topsy-turvy the series of events in time, as does Mr. Huxley in this book. The only machine that does that is the human mind, in its efforts to remember and in its sub-conscious re-creation of the past. Mr. Huxley has not used a psychological method of presentment, he writes as an impersonal narrator, recording from outside the happening of events. The result is a book which is at a first reading considerably more puzzling than The Waves, and irritating as The Waves is not, because the feature which causes the difficulty has no obvious artistic justification. So skilfully, however, has Mr. Huxley used his method that, as one
reads on, one instinctively recognises and co-ordinates these different strata, and on a second reading everything falls more or less naturally into its place. In this respect, the book is a tour de force: the thing is done so well that really it is almost as satisfactory as if it had not been done at all.
