"The Master," subtitled "An Adventure Story," concerns two well-born English children held captive in a hollow rock in mid-Atlantic, where amid the sough of water and air and the whir of a helicopter a murderous antique of a scientist and his grotesque staff have devised a means to rule the world. It is one of the most beguiling and yet one of the most straightforward of Mr. White's tales; and while in some respects it is a new departure for him, it resumes firmly a career that had seemed to sink into confused dabbling.

Mr. White was born in 1906 in India of English parents, was at Cheltenham and Cambridge, was a schoolmaster at Stowe; then threw over teaching and the more solidly worked novels of his teaching years, rewrote the Arthurian legends in a new style—fashioned of conscious anachronisms, faint twitches of bawdry and gusts of lyricism...