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Novels and Novelists

Fishing as a Fine Art

Fishing as a Fine Art

The Tragic Bride — By F. Brett Young

After reading ‘The Young Physician’ in the winter of last year we were left with the feeling that the author's page 262 next novel would be very ‘significant’; it would show, it could not help showing which way he was going to travel and the degree to which he cared whether it was a question of his readers showing him the direction they preferred him to take. Did he realize how well he had described the relations between the small boy and his mother? There was, under that apparent simplicity, what appeared to be a very honest sincere attempt to face the great difficulty which presents itself to the writers of to-day—which is to find their true expression and to make it adequate to the new fields of experience. That Mr. Young did not succeed in this attempt did not surprise us. But what he did put a keen edge on our anticipation of the next time.

Well, the next time has come and we are positively flung into the air along with the author, his line, bait, reel and all. What has happened? What waters are these to be fished? Let us, if we are after the tragic bride, be cast. But no! Our state is one of suspension from beginning to end. ‘The Tragic Bride’ is a fisherman's reverie; and, fascinating as that may be to the fisherman, rich enough, complete enough to need no excuse; though he may return from it with the memory of a day's exploration to satisfy him, we, who have been promised fish—wonderful enchanted fishes—are brought to the point of exasperation.

If we had not been prepared so carefully for a prize most rare! But the opening pages are full of nothing but such a preparation. If we had been given a hint that after all the outing might have to be ‘all,’ even then we should not have felt cheated. But to follow and to follow and to follow—to listen, to attend, to be ever watchful, and then to have the chase complicated wilfully—so we feel by this time—is too much for the reader to bear. We remain Mr. Brett Young's disappointed and disheartened admirers.

(September 24, 1920.)