[The Spiral Road] is a vast, luxuriant sprawling examination of decay: the softening up of a young doctor's integrity, ambition and self-respect by loneliness, disillusion and sexual fantasy…. [Mr. de Hartog] has apparently determined to write an immense novel, and by standards of length alone he has succeeded.

The characters are innumerable and none of them is quite sane or real. The writing has zest but little shape or style. Mr. de Hartog, who once wrote a beautifully shaped short novel called Stella, has thrown caution to the winds, let his fertile imagination run riot and allowed himself a kind of sailor's pipe-dream of landsmen's depravity. The result is nothing if not entertaining…. [The] romanticist's myopic view of the tropical doctor's life has been corrected by some eye-opening details, and decadence and degeneration are given as many imaginative twists as fiction, rather than reality, can contrive. For, in...