Timber: A Novel of Pacific Coast Loggers
By $2.75 MORROW
OSTENSIBLY a story of labor relations, Timber attains its real interest as simply a vivid and circumstantial picture of the logging operation itself as prosecuted in coastal British Columbia just before the outbreak of the present war. Whether, and when, the halfhearted preliminary attempts at unionization will bear fruit we are not made greatly to care. Most ot the workers themselves are shown as being chronically indifferent, and even the protagonist who is the most fervidly radical on the subject arrives at a halt-suspicion that he has been wasting himself in premature futilities. What carries thorough conviction is the running account of the work and of the men who do it — their fanatical pride of craft, their inarticulate comradeship, their monotonously profane violence of speech, and the fatalistic acceptance ot daily and hourly hazards that explains their generally lurid taste in recreations. W. F.