Country life -- England -- Fiction; Short stories, English; Working class -- England -- Fiction
=The Daily Telegraph.=—‘The story is full of strong scenes, depicted
with a somewhat lavish use of violet pigments, such as, perhaps, the
stirring situations demand. Here and there, however, are purple patches,
in which Mr. Stevenson shows all his cunning literary art—the
description of the coral island, for instance.... Some intensely graphic
and dramatic pages delineate the struggle which causes, and a final
scene ... concludes this strange fragment from the wild life of the
South Sea.’
=The St. James’s Gazette.=—‘The book takes your imagination and
attention captive from the first chapter—nay, from the first
paragraph—and it does not set them free till the last word has been
read.’
=The Standard.=—‘Mr. Stevenson gives such vitality to his characters,
and so clear an outlook upon the strange quarter of the world to which
he takes us, that when we reach the end of the story, we come back to
civilisation with a start of surprise, and a moment’s difficulty in
realising that we have not been actually away from it.’
=The Daily Chronicle.=—‘We are swept along without a pause on the
current of the animated and vigorous narrative. Each incident and
adventure is told with that incomparable keenness of vision which is Mr.
Stevenson’s greatest charm as a story-teller.’
=The Pall Mall Gazette.=—‘It is brilliantly invented, and it is not less
brilliantly told. There is not a dull sentence in the whole run of it.
And the style is fresh, alert, full of surprises—in fact, is very good
latter-day Stevenson indeed.’
=The World.=—‘It is amazingly clever, full of that extraordinary
knowledge of human nature which makes certain creations of Mr.
Stevenson’s pen far more real to us than persons we have met in the
flesh. Grisly the book undoubtedly is, with a strength and a vigour of
description hardly to be matched in the language.... But it is just
because the book is so extraordinarily good that it ought to be better,
ought to be more of a serious whole than a mere brilliant display of
fireworks, though each firework display has more genius in it than is to
be found in ninety-nine out of every hundred books supposed to contain
that rare quality.’
=The Morning Post.=—‘Boldly conceived, probing some of the darkest
depths of the human soul, the tale has a vigour and breadth of touch
which have been surpassed in none of Mr. Stevenson’s previous works....
We do not, of course, know how much Mr. Osbourne has contributed to the
tale, but there is no chapter in it which any author need be unwilling
to acknowledge, or which is wanting in vivid interest.’
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY I. ZANGWILL
With A Photogravure Portrait of the Author
_In One Volume, price 6s._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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