Theme and Form in the Novel

134 criminal cases such as those of George Edalji and Oscar Slater. There can be no doubt that the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes partook of some of the experiences, interests and personality traits of Conan Doyle; but it is, of course, common for an author to give facets of himself to his creation. Furthermore, such parallels as the Hardwicks point out have been discussed before in previous biographies of Doyle such as that by Hesketh Pearson and especially that by John Dickson Carr entitled The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published in 1949. Carr, a writer of detective stories, went over the Edalji and Slater material thoroughly. The Hardwicks' book, then, is a rehash of earlier biographers' work, and though an effort is made to cast this material in a new light, not much illumination is given. The only value of the Hardwicks' work can be as an introduction to those not familiar with either Doyle or Holmes, and then only if it leads curious readers, untutored in the exploits of the Great Detective, to investigate the sixty stories concerning Sherlock Holmes. Purdue University Edward S. Lauterbach 8, Theme and Form in the Novel John Edward Hardy. MAN IN THE MODERN NOVEL. Seattle: University of Washington P, 1964. $5.00. The essays here collected are the outgrowth of Mr. Hardy's lectures at Notre Dame and later at the American Institute of the University of Munich. Two of the eleven essays had been previously published. Of the eleven essays, the first three, on Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence, should be of special Interest to ELT readers. The title suggests a catch-all which would allow the inclusion of almost any modern novel, and the fact that Mr. Hardy really means "the quest for identity" does little to give the book more unity. Mr. Hardy, it seems to me, has written eleven interesting and often perceptive essays on eleven authors, mainly in individual novels. The book might as well have been called "Eleven Studies in the Modern Novel." After a somewhat tiresome effort in his introduction to prepare for the application of the announced theme to the specific novels he discusses, Hardy confesses that he did not begin with the theme as such, and then select novels to illustrate it. Rather, I was interested first in the novels themselves, separately, and in no particular sequence, and the theme only very gradually emerged over a considerable length of time as the burden of my preoccupations in reading and talking about the books, Mr. Hardy writes that he is "interested in the theme primarily as a key to problems of novelistic form." My impression from the last few pages of Hardy's introduction and from the essays themselves is that he is interested mainly in novelistic form itself. Mr. Hardy's notion of form is apparently a romanticist one—the form is organic, the novel is anthropomorphic. Fortunately, after a misty, pseudo-philosophical introduction, Hardy gets down to the business at hand of dealing with specific novels specifically in a lucid way. On the whole, however, I do not think that the essays on Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence add very significantly to the previous discussions of THE HEART OF DARKNESS, HOWARDS END, or SONS AND LOVERS. Purdue University H. E. Gerber ...