"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—and made his fame. Then growing malice, and some delicately tendentious fantasy; then a series of books, satires and works on falconry and eighteenth-century gossip, each more dismally received than the last. Then "The Master." Never has Mr. White's taste been surer, or his style more easily directed to all ages and sorts of readers at once, than in this. (p. 4)
This is a free excerpt of 208 words. There are 470 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our White, T(erence) H(anbury) 1906–1964: Critical Essay by Donald Barr Access Pass.
