The Bay
By $2.50 LIPPINCOTT
AT the opening of this novel the hero, Luke Mangan, who is setting out at the age of fifty-seven to tell the story of his life in Dublin, declares that he wants to write in a new way. ‘I have to be able to move about in my life. I have to see it from a hilltop, to range about in it like a hawk, not to ride through it on the flat like a man taking a tram from Dalkey to the Pillar.’ But there is not really anything new in the way the story is told. It is a straightforward biographical novel, and, as in almost all biographical novels, the scenes of the hero’s childhood are the best part of it. They and the characters which people them are first-rate. Luke’s early days with a Miss Murdstone-like aunt; his escape from that to happiness with a Peggoty-like Ann Dunn; his schooldays and the portraits of the monks who taught him; the barber’s shop which was the club of the locality and full of odd people; his auctioneer uncle, ‘ the doctor,’ and the women of the waterfront — all these are drawn with great zest and breadth, with an acute eye tor visual detail and an equally acute ear for picturesque speech. But, once adult, the hero becomes somewhat commonplace. His adventures with women follow the usual pattern, with two arbitrary and convenient deaths to prepare the way for the solid domestic happiness in which we leave him. E. D.