# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3812/Our Booking-Office

Punch's regular book review column.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Three numbers of The South Polar Times were brought out at Cape Evans, the winter quarters of Captain Scott, during 1911. Mr. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the editor, has now presented them to a wider circle under the auspices of Smith, Elder, hoping that they will prove "a source of interest and pleasure to the friends of the expedition." He need have no fears. Of course a paper produced under such conditions is in its nature esoteric, and many of its jokes are lost if you "don't know Jimson." But if you have previously read Scott's Last Expedition then will will "know Jimson"; you will feel that every man at Cape Evans in 1911 was a personal friend of yours, and you will be delighted with this facsimile reproduction of the paper which delighted them. Personally I cannot read or see too much of the men who are my heroes; and in a world where an ordinary school-girl is allowed twenty-seven photographs of Mr. Lewis Waller I shall not consider myself surfeited with two caricatures and a humorous character-sketch of Lieutenant Bowers. But there are contributions to The South Polar Times which have an interest other than the merely personal. Mr. Griffith Taylor, a tower of strength on the literary side, is really funny in The Bipes—a paper (on the wingless bipeds of Cape Evans) supposed to have been read by Oates' escaped rabbit to the Royal Society of Rabbits. Mr. Taylor, as a recorder of history in Scott's Last Expedition, was, I thought, a little too famililar; in these and other articles he is much more at home. But it is upon Dr. Wilson's pictures (both serious and comic) that The South Polar Times can most justly pride itself. I envy Mr. Cherry-Garrard so prolific and brilliant a contributor. Still more I envy him (and all his colleagues at Cape Evans) the knowledge of such a man. The more I get to know of "Bill" Wilson, the more I understand that he was of the very salt of the earth—a man to love whom was indeed a liberal education, and to be loved by whom was a passport to the little company of the elect.
When John Barleycorn (Mills and Boon) came my way, I noticed that the publishers had shown a reticence, unusual in these days, on the outside paper cover; they didn't say a word as to the quality or character of the contents. They had three good reasons: first, given the name of Jack London, there was no need of further advertisement or lure; second, if they had started describing the book they would have been unable to say with strict truth that it was or was not a novel, for it isn't and it is; third, and best, they couldn't, as honest men, have avoided mentioning that it is in a way a sermon on alcoholism, and that, being said, might have acted as a deterrent, unless they had explained (as they wouldn't have had room to do) how and why, when they said "sermon," they didn't really mean "sermon." So they lay low and said nothing, and I almost wish I had done the same, for no one who has the lightest interest, practical or theoretical, in John Barleycorn ought to be put off these alcoholic memoirs. They diarist purports to have been first drunk at the age of five, again at the age of seven, almost perpetually for a spell of years from the age of fifteen, and yet to have taken over a quarter of a century to acquire a liking for alcohol. That sounds odd, but it is not unique. Not only in California and not only in the lower grades of society, is Youth, vigorous and unspoilt, bound to acquire the taste if it would foregather on lively and intimate terms with its fellows; and not only in the saloons of ​the Oakland water-front are fine youngsters drinking themselves permanently silly because it is their only way of being men among men, jolly good fellows among jolly good fellows. A sound enough text for any sermon; and, I may honestly add, a sound enough sermon for any text, with a strong smell of the sea and of adventure about it. But I ask myself for what purpose the photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Jack London is inserted as a frontispiece? As well, I think, have had a portrait of Mr. Mills, with Mr. Boon inset.
Isn't The Youngest World (Bell) an engaging title for a book? It caught my interest at once. I am not altogether sure that the story itself is as good as its name, but that still leaves a margin of quality, and I for one have enjoyed it greatly in patches. Let Mr. Robert Dunn not too hastily condemn me if I say that he has written a fatiguing tale. Partly I mean this as a high compliment. The descriptions of hardships borne and physical difficulties overcome by his hero are so vivid that they convey a sensation of actual bodily strain in a manner that only one other living writer can equal. There are chapters in the book that leave one aching all over. So long, in fact, as Mr. Dunn's characters are content to do things, to climb mountains, to ford rivers, to endure hunger and cold and weariness, I am in close bodily sympathy with them; it is when they begin to talk and to explain their mental states that my keenness is threatened by another and less pleasing fatigue. It is not that the scope of the story—a man's regeneration by love and hardship—isn't a good one: quite the contrary. It is that I simply do not believe that human beings, especially those that figure in this book, would ever talk about themselves in this particular way. "In the name of our own blood," she uttered softtly, "of Love, the Future, and Victory..." That is a random sentence from the last page, and very typical of Mr. Dunn's dialogue. It is full of gracious qualities, thoughtful, and throughout on a high literary level, but as a realistic transcription of frontier talk it leaves me incredulous. Still the setting, I repeat, is quite wonderful. You shall read the chapters that tell of Gail's ascent of Mount Lincoln, and see if they don't stir your blood, especially where he reaches the top, alone (and therefore unable to talk), and sees the world at his feet. You will exult in this.
Mr. Victor Bridges has a very versatile pen and in most of the twenty-one pieces of Jetsam (Mills and Boon) which he has recovered from the waves of monthly magazines and elsewhere there is a certain amount of material for mirth. I do not however find him a startlingly original humorist, whether on the river Thames, where he seems to follow in the wake of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, or in a Chelsea "pub" where his manners are reminiscent of the characters of Messrs. W. W. Jacobs and Morton Howard. Again, in the story called "The First Marathon" (where, by the way, he states that "It is true that the word 'Marathon' was first used in connection with the old Olympian games," which seems a little unfair to Miltiades), the fun mainly depends on the use of such phrases as "Spoo-fer," "King Kod," and the "Can't-stik-you-shun-all Club." Other stories are of the adventurous or romantic type sacred to serial fiction, no fewer than three dealing with escaped convicts on Dartmoor, and one (the first in the book) describing the chance meeting of a man and a pretty girl on an uninhabited island off the West Coast of Scotland. Here, for some reason or other, the man insisted on calling his charming and unknown companion Astarte, a name which, if I had been in her place, I should have been inclined to resent. But Mr. Bridges' dialogue is nearly always bright, and his knowledge of the machinery of yarn-spinning excellent. There is just one other point however which I should like to mention. The book includes a brand-new Russian wolf-story, in which the heroes protect themselves from the bites of these ferocious quadrupeds by putting on armour, which they find in a deserted house. I don't object to that; but, when they leave the railway line along which they have been travelling and plunge into a forest-path they come to a place where the route forks and cannot make out which of the two roads will be more likely to lead them back to the railway. I do not feel that these men were the sort of people to be trusted to wander by themselves in a desolate Siberian anecdote.