New-York tribune., 1921-11-27

'A'eipenetrating the present. you
young ones will have the wor,a - :.
WIN rs you please. Our time ia eion.,
'u' oone think that you can begin tho
"orio again rs though nothing h.d
ever happened before. There ia all that
'ovehness, that beauty, longing to be
useo- The lessons that you are to learn
arc ene very same lessons that genera
'ioh after generation has learnt before
you lake the past which is beseech-
ing you not to desert it and let it min
sie Win the present. Don't let modern
cieVerness make you contemptuous Of
ali chat has gone before you. Thev
were as clever as you In their own
generation. This beauty, this history
'nis love that has sunk into these walls
ana strengthened these trees. carry
'nese On with you as your COM
panions."
The versatile and prolific E. Phillips
oppenheim has turned out novel
quite up to the times in it's treatment
OF economic and political problems of
Great Britain. Bringing all hin clevsr
skill to bear, he merges two distinct
Plots; one deals with big arena of
Parliament and the field Of British
organized labor, and the other with a
love episode with minute settings In
houses in London and on the west
coast OF England. Andrew Tallente,
over fifty, who had married an Ameri-
can woman with fat purse, to dis
cover that they are not lovers, has
been defeated in an election for q
seat in the House of Commons. He Is
at his lonely country house near Bris-
tol. A young woman, one Jane, a
neighbor, floats into his life while he
is sequestered, and she never floats
out of it. In fact, she becomes his
awakener to a sense of the futfity Of
his withdrawal from active life. She
also stirs in him old inhibited long
ings.
One night, it comes early in the
story, Tallente, in quarrel with his
secretary, hits him and causes him to
fall over a cliff to a beach below,
where a strong food tide is running
He fears ne has killed the man. Later
he finds that paper he had written
for the press during the war is miss
'ng, and he suspects that his secretary
had it on the night of the fall. This
paper turns up eventually and nearly
wrecks Tal,ente's career. However, it
S a mere stone in the current of the
story. and scarcely causes a ripple IN
he tide OF growing love of Jane and
Tallente.
Naturally there are two elements in
"Nobody's Man" The first deals with
Taliente, at first adrift wanted by no
one. man or woman. We learn that he
"stood for new and menacing things
in politics. He had to certain ea
tent cut himself adrift from the world
which Starts at Eton and Oxford and
ends by making mild puns on the judi
cial bench or uttering sonorous plati-
tudes from a properly accredited seat
in the House." Oppenheim tells with
gusto the account of Tallente's winning
out as o victor in a coalition of labor
and conservative socialist wings in
British politics and revels in inside
knowledge of dangerous conditions in
the present British body polite. His
hero is at the top of the Parliamentary
heap when the novel ends. A sufficient
foil exists in the unfolding of the love
of Tallente and Jane. Here is case of
man supposedly lost in the mael-
strom of civil life, reaching up and
seizing the hand of a woman at least
twenty years his junior, who frees and
fires him with flames kindled from a