No Arms, No Armour

THE winner of the second All-Nations Prize Novel Competition, Major Henriques’s book will naturally attract many readers. And they will not be disappointed, for it contains enough first-rate narrative about the life of a young British officer in the 1920’s, his adventures steeplechasing at home, on service in the Sudan, exploring on leave, and the like, to make good value. The two quite extraordinary officers who are his superiors and friends are convincingly drawn, and their efforts to make young Tubby Windrush something more than a well-bred subaltern are explicable. But Tubby’s soul struggles are not only necessarily sophomoric in themselves but sophomorically conceived and told. In this essential element of the novel, whose theme is Tubby Windrush’s spiritual education, the novel cannot be called sure or successful.