FOR once we have a novel which everybody who likes
novels ought to rush out and buy. Glorious Life is one of the most consistently entertaining and engaging books I have read since the war. The story is nothing much and indeed gets away to a slowish start; a small, diffident, literary civil servant in the Ministry of Fine Arts gets involved in various unsatisfactory ways with a girl in the office, the female half of the married couple he rooms with, and an official project for the establishment of halls of residence for artists on the Hemlock and After model. Along this thread Mr. Derek Barton has strung a series of hilarious but perfectly real portraits; the matronly man of culture, the repellent security officer, the assis- tant secretary with the look of a Rossetti stunner, the romantic, bountiful, shady financier. The mood shifts from attractive malice to plausible and acceptable sentiment; the writing shows a brilliant grasp of comic allusion and simile; the personality deducible behind the writing is intelligent, amiable and gay. The most out- standing merit, perhaps, is the tremendous capacity shown for seizing on the concrete detail so as to limit and fix character, class, place, season, period. The result, in less skilled hands, might be on the one hand merely smart and knowing, and on the other, merely local and ephemeral. But what we have is a convincing comic picture of modern urban life illuminated, as any such picture must be, by seriousness and by an unshakable sense of relevance. There are plenty of jokes, and they are all different—rather rare, that. For once there shall be no reservations; let me go on record as having read Glorious Life with intense and continuous enjoy- ment and—greatest rarity of all—with the intention of reading it again as soon as I can.
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