What goes on inside Rockall? A fascinating hypothesis is supplied this week by T. H. White, in [The Master], which he himself describes as 'a simple adventure story with a suppressed moral.' I don't think most readers will want to bother very much about the moral, which is supposedly the fashionable modern one of megalomania, brainwashing and the thirst for absolute power, etc. Nor, oddly enough, does one take the adventure part of the book very breathlessly either…. The real gratification, as in T. H. White's former novels, comes from the author's personality and his mode of conveying it, a mode that seems particularly English in its assumption and corresponding avoidance of certain things—bravery, loyalty, sex and so forth—and its appearance—despite these limitations—of absolute intellectual freedom, which comes from its unself-conscious abruptness and its inconsequential poetic drift around arresting topics, like the expression of a puffin's eye or the fact that one shouts a warning to oneself if one is pushed over a cliff. As also in the writing of Richard Hughes and Arthur Ransome there is an added twist of pleasurable fraudulence in the spectacle of someone so obviously intelligent keeping up so determinedly English a persona! I recommend The Master wholeheartedly, not least because Mr. White and his two brisk and practical child heroes maintain this brave and refreshing pretence of not knowing why hollowed-out islands and caverns under-sea have such fascination for us. There are many critics today to tell them, but fortunately they are still too busy on The Tempest and Kubla Khan to get around to the adventure story. (p. 290)
John Bayley, in a review of "The Master," in The Spectator, No. 6714, March 1, 1957, pp. 290-91.
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