Life and Musicians

"HUNTSMAN IN THE SKY" is a first novel, and it is to be regretted that most critics will view it with that fact in mind. For too often prejudice will obscure critical truth when one knows that it is the author's first. Granville. Toogood has written an outstanding book, a book which most readers will find good.

The persons in the novel stand out as figures in relief on a background of Philadelphia society. Three of them are particularly well done. There of them are particularly well done. There is Grandfather Lloyd, representative of the old aristocracy; Anne is the girl who is part of her city only against her will; Bertram Garrison, the principal character, is the young composer whose creative spirit struggles for realization in the face of various softening influences. The other characters, except Elaine, blend into the background; she stands apart, a curiosly fascinating figure whose charm is as inexplicable as her detachment from the rest of the scene is apparent.

Bart returns to his Philadelphia home after years of musical study in Paris. "There it had been whispered he would win the Prix de Rome. And then, in an instant he had lost it." A little Jew walks off with the prize, and when the two have become "confidentially drunk together," the Jew says, "Do you know what is the matter with your music? Nothing has ever happened to you."

Bart comes home, and things happen to him. It is not a new theme, but in "Huntsman in the Sky" it attains new significance as the story of Bart Garrison is unfolded. Elaine he cannot love, Anne he does not. Conflicts of self and surroundings almost discourage him; little by little he downs them, and produces his music in the end. It is and novel of conflict, treated with sympathy and imagination.

At times one feels that the author has forgotten his theme, as when he lets his characters wander to Florida in the midst of the land boom. The devotion of page after page to the character development of persons not immediately concerened in the story tends to destroy the proportion of the novel and proves to be its major fault.