THE BOOK OF TALBOT By Violet Clifton .
This is an amazing book, for Talbot. Clifton was an amazing man. He should have been an Elizabethan -soldier-pirate- explorer, but, being born- to a, large estate in the late nineteenth century, he ha to take his adventure where he could find it. He managed to find it, too. The goldfields of Alaska were one of his early hunting-grounds : then came the Barren Lands " in the far North, where after months of voluntary hardship ' he shot a musk-ox. Siberia was another jaunt, Tibet another, Central Africa another, and the War an interlude. " Placing myself in voluntary exile," he wrote, " gives me that peace which civilization and its currency do not hold for me." He had to live dangerously, to explore : yet he would read philosophy in the wilds, play the flute to , the Eskimos, and never ,move anywhere without his Shakespeare.- -There are adventures enough, and excitements enough, in this book, to stir even the most hardened reader : and the style is enough to put almost any reader off it. Much of Mrs. Clifton's narrative is made up from her husband's diaries, but the extracts- are beivilderingly connected in a manner both staccato and lush. - When she comes to the adventures after his marriage, in many of which she shared, she is simpler and easier to follow, but The Book of Talbot (Faber and. Faber, , 15s.) is nowhere a good argument for the lyric approach to the adventure story. The story itself, however, is undeniably worth perseverance. The personality of its hero; in spite of much hero-worship, emerges vividly from Mrs. Clifton's pages, for she was wholly in sympathy with ' him ; and, as a corrective, there is among the notes, almost on the last page, an'excellent summing-up by an acquaintance of Talbot Clifton's dynamic, larger-than-life-size character.
Previous page
