The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-08-20

story May Sinclair pictures group of curiously assorted and dssimilar char acters with tremendous force of reality and vividness. It Is impossible to resist the impression that Tasker Jevons, the struggling, triumphant lovable impu- dent little cockney, half genius and half "bounder' is an actual, living char acter, and Viola Thesinger, adorable and bewilderingly complex, is no less con- vincing. The climax of the story is set in scenes of the European war.
 It Is the famous belfry of Bruges which gives the book it's title and symbolizes the adventure the effort to see and real ze the beautiful, fine thing which lies at it's heart. It Is "to look at the belfry' that Tasker Jevons and Viola Thesiger go to Bruges-a mad, ingenious escapade which affects all their future lives. And the lives of others well, including those fWalter Furnival, who tells the story of Tasker Jevons as he knew and saw it, and Norah Thesger not the heroine of the book, but the woman who quite easily takes the first place in the reader S evidently intended to be both appealing and lovable. is too outrageously selfish to win even liking. It would be possible to forgive her rather unfeelng treatment of her father and mother in the opening part of the book. because she is then very young, and this same youth and her passion make tolerable the Bruges incl dent, although the utter innocence and ignorance of the pair most concerned is so "preposterous" that all Miss Sinclair S wonderful art can scarcely make it cred ible. But it is Violas three years de- tachmentf her "rather appalling injustice, '' her behavior to Walter throughout, and especially when, after their arrival in Belgium, she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out this to one who had done everything pos sible for her-and the way in which, to ease her own anxiety. she not only made a general nuisance of herself, but actual ly tortured the two men who loved her, which deprive her of every shred of sym pathy. She had done the best thing for her own peace of mind" other people S was not to her a matter of the very small est consequence
 The plot of the story when reduced to it's simplest form, is by no means an un- familiar one. All the more for this very reason does one bow before Miss Sin clair's admirable artistry The method of narration-telling it all through one of the important characters and letting him reveal himself in the process-doubles the psychic entanglement, making it at times not altogether easy to get at the author
 
 most subtle and delicate psychological analysis-and if there are moments when 1t seems as though the author delighted not only to split hairs, but re-split them and then subdivide the subdivisions. the sureness and deftness of the process abash criticism And then. as always in Miss Sinclair's books, there Is the ex- ceptional ability to create atmosphere. The Thesiger home at Canterbury has it's own and so has JimmXs Mayfair monstrosty and the little Belgian village of Melle wheer the three shells struck one after the other, and Jimmy crowned those splendid three weeks into which he had packed "the maximum of glory and ot risk"
 And then comes the sharp contrast of that one glimpse of Jevons' own hideous childhood. For back to Jevons it is al ways necessary to come. He is. in very truth, the core of this new story, the worthy creation of a writer who belongs in the front rank of living noveists