The Master is an ingenious extravaganza on the borders of science fiction, satire and straight adventure. It has affinities with the Hibbert Journal and the Boy's Own Paper. It reminds me of The Tempest, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Lost Horizon with perhaps a breadth of High Wind in Jamaica. Nicky and Judy, children of a duke, land from a yacht on the island of Rockall with their dog and are first pushed into the sea, then shot at, then rescued by the Master's agents. The Master is a physicist of genius aged 157 with singular telepathic powers, and a brain so extraordinary that he has to paralyse his higher critical centres with whisky before he can get down to mundane matters as opposed to the global and cosmic problems which are his preoccupation. His agents include a stock philosophical Chinaman, a Welsh doctor, an ex-R.A.F. pilot, and a Negro whose tongue has been cut out. His grand design is the compulsory reform of the human race by means of rays.
It sounds, put baldly like that, too pubescent a fantasy altogether. But though I do not myself think that Mr. White has quite brought it off—it remains too much of a mish-mash of ideas and wheezes—it is remarkable how readable he has made it. The children are alive and distinct. Their reactions, varying from the emotional to the matter of fact, are just right. The descriptions of their physical experiences of the island, the sea and the sun are very nicely done. Some of the agents, the latter-day Calibans, have character and the Master himself smacks far more of Prospero than of that insipid old thing, the Lama of Shangri La. His downfall incidentally is neatly brought about, after all human attempts have failed, by the dog. You can take him or leave him, but he is less of a bore than you expect.
Maurice Richardson, in a review of "The Master," in The New Statesman & Nation, Vol. LIII, No. 1356, March 9, 1957, p. 316.
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