Book Description

"The Sinner's Comedy" is a story by John Oliver Hobbes, who first touched the public pulse in Some Emotion and a Moral. Although its author's name is new in fiction, The Sinner's Comedy does not strike one as a youthful work. It wears an air of experience: as if the writer knew too much to be merely cynical, and yet was so modern that he is afraid to be anything else than cynical. It is when you come to write about it that yon learn how little of a story there is to tell. The book may be read in an hour; and in that time some half-a-dozen characters are discovered with remarkable brilliancy. The method of the unfolding may be seen in this explanation of the change which took place in Richard Kilcoursie when he came into his title. "Then life took at once a wider and a narrower meaning: wider, because his interests covered a larger field, narrower, because his own personality-the figure of Sir Richard Kilcoursie-blocked up the way. Not that his egoism was loud-voiced or swaggering-it was merely constant: if his intellect had possessed an equal stability he would, no doubt, have achieved greatness." That passage illustrates the manner in which The Sinner's Comedy is written from first to last. The dialogue is brilliant with exactly the same brilliancy-; although two pages of Mrs. Grimmage's conversation display a turn for broader humour which the author nowhere else indulges. Thus, the story affords an intellectual rather than an emotional incitement. Nevertheless, it ends sentimentally; that is because in every case the story, and not the writer, must have the last word. We have a suspicion that through it all the author of The Sinner's Comedy is restraining sentiment. If So, the restraining process has resulted in one of the cleverest of recent books. -- National and English Review, Vol. 19