Book Reviews

"The Man on a Donkey"

H. F. M. Prescott (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 2-vol. edition. 1952; 1-vol. edition. 1953, 15/-.)

Not one of the major overseas critics who reviewed this book when it was first published in England last year hesitated to stick their necks out and claim it as one of the best historical novels published in English.

It was compared, inevitability, with "The Cloister and the Hearth" and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando." but the comparisons only heighten one's Impression that Miss Prescott has attained heights not touched by other writers in this genre. The comparison with "Orlando" is partly unfair, for the intentions of the authors differ, but unfortunately for Miss Woolf, balanced like a trick-cyclist on the thread of sensibility, in comparison with Reade. Miss Prescott also shows to advantage. Reade described himself as being primarily a dramatist, and even in his masterpiece the stage-setter and scene shifter have a tendency to override the novelist and, at times, to overwhelm completely the historian. One of the most important Reade bio graphics, by W. C. Phillips, is called "Dickens, Reade and Collins. Sensation Novelists": but Miss Prescott's biographers will remember her as being first second and third an historian.

She is an historian par excellence—one with not only many years' study behind her, but with the rare gift of penetrating so deeply her period that she can speak with its authentic spirit and accent. "The Man on a Donkey" describes the great North country rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, by which the men from the North tried to stay the hand of Henry VIII in his attack on the monasteries and convents, it is in the form of a chronicle, chosen. Miss Prescott says. "in on attempt to introduce the reader into a world, rather than at first to present him with a narrative.

The use of the form is more than justified by the success with which the author has created the temper and spirit of Tudor England. She has at once written a work unequalled in scope and depth, with an extra dimension in comparison with most other commentaries on the period, and produced one of the most moving stories I have read. Advertising has so debased the participle that we tend to keep it for the magic results of scented soap; but there really is not another term for the book. By the time the Pilgrimage begins we feel that we know the main characters intimately, and as it moves to its inevitable failure, the feeling of tragedy, in the overcoming of a principle, and of the individuals concerned, is almost overwhelming. One of the strengths of Miss Prescott's writing is that the reader is aware that the tragedy is inevitable through his knowledge of the characters of the king on the one hand and the Pilgrims on the other.

Miss Prescott has a note stating which characters are historical and the few incidents in the plot for which there is no documentary evidence This, and an impressive bibiliography, assure the reader that the facts are straight; while the language is unmistakably that of Tudor England. Robert Aske's references to the natural law are the arguments thrashed out in St. Thomas More's or Thomas Starkey's "Dialogues." and the turn of speech is that of Archbishop Morton or Thomas Lupset themselves.

"The Man on a Donkey." and Miss Prescott's biography, "Mary Tudor," awarded the James Tait Black Prize, 1941, are especially good reading as antidotes to the considerable amount of unprecise and sentimental writing about Tudor England inevitable in this Coronation year.