The Old Gods Still Living

IN the wash of triangular humans and complexed realism that floods the fiction table in our book store really palatable swashbuckling yarns of blood and thunder stand out like welcome terra firma to a man in an open boat. For in the shifting sea of truth and actuality where floats the usual novel of today, the convincing tale of the impossible is a delectable and long sought isle where the casual reader may forget for a time that life is after all a rather nasty combination of prohibitions and inhibitions.

Indeed, it is the more to be wondered at that the man who was known in his time as one of the most brilliant of Oxford undergraduates, and who thereafter served through the war, is able to produce with almost unfailing regularity a handsome and convincing tale of the high adventure. On the other hand, remembering that he spent considerable time in South Africa after taking his degree, and travelled over Europe as a special corespondent and possesses an abiding love for the Scotch moors, his flare for the romantic is not so astonishing.

In his latest novel, "The Dancing Floor," Mr. Buchan shifts somewhat his old location of the Highlands, and his gentlemen are not of his usual type of British sportsmen. It is, in fact, somewhat of a shock to see his technique work as well amongst the hills of an Aegan island as amongst his own Trossachs, and the psychological actuate his characters where once the adventurous ran them in and out of impossible situations. But the change is not displeasing nor unconvincing. He shows, moreover, a knowledge of ancient rites and prehistoric religions that lend a peculiar fascination to the tale. It is a yarn by a scholar of the antique, if thta is comprehensible, a romance by an author who knows the romance of the past and proves that the truth or near truth after all is stranger than fiction. For the old preChristian festival of the coming of spring--in Plakos, the scene of the action, with the holy spring, the race of the young men and the sacrifices to appease a jealous God--on the outcome of which hangs of fate of the not unpleasing flapper heroine--lends a back-ground and flavor not to be found in the ordinary detective thriller. The past, the primitive past, with its mysteries and festivals that one feels are perhaps after all part of man, hangs over the book, a dark and rather compelling cloud.

The only possible fault in the book is the construction, for the whole action hangs on two incidents that one realizes, if one stops to analyze, and placed together for no good reason at all. But there is no reason why one should stop to analyze the book unless one has already read, as had the reviewer, a short story of Mr. Buchan's built around one of the incidents. This self-plagiarism Mr. Buchan acknowledges in a note in the front, but it seems rather a pity that he should have used old, and really unessential material, in the making of the book. Besides this, there is one slip in the writing where we find the one-armed corporal throwing dice to pass the time, "right hand against left." But these faults do not materially affect a really fine story