The Roll-Call
By . New York: George H. Doran Co. 1919. 12mo, 417 pp. $1.50.
The Roll-Cull is more a by-product than a rounding-out. of the Clayhanger series. George Cannon, its central figure, is the son of Hilda Lessways by the bigamous marriage of which, as a girl, she was the innocent victim. Readers of Clayhanger will remember that the baffled, thwarted, and slightly inept young Five-Townsman who is its hero burns with the secret ambition to be an architect. It is a notable, Bennettian, and true piece of irony that George Cannon, a lad not of Clayhanger’s blood, should become that architect of youthful dreams, dreamed thirty years before. Why, one wonders at first, does not Mr. Bennett make more of this kindly stroke of irony, which could have integrated The Roll-Call with the three earlier books?
The answer is, of course, the war, which answers nowadays all the questions it does not ask. Cannon exists, not to be the fulfillment or continuum of his mother and his step-father, but to be any young Englishman of the professional or artistic class, in the months of 1914, when the war began calling the roll of individual consciences and requiring a decisive answer of each. Cannon is as deeply enmeshed in life as most men. There are projects, complications, an expensive wife, expensive children, all sorts of demands upon him. But he tears his life up by the roots, for the emotionally satisfying reason that he cannot possibly do anything else; and we see him last in the khaki of the Royal Field Artillery, trekking south across England to a Channel port. And — here seems to be the point — it turns out that all his affairs can somehow worry through very decently without him. The feeling of his indispensableness is nine tenths illusion.
All this is highly and finely representative. But surely it is an artistic blunder to relate the hero to the Clayhangers, and then leave the relationship functionless and without point in the development of the character. H. T. F.