Collier, John - David Garnett (review date 8 April 1933)

David Garnett (review date 8 April 1933)

SOURCE: Garnett, David. “Current Literature.” New Statesman and Nation 50, no. III (8 April 1933): 448.

[In the following review, Garnett considers Tom's A-Cold a disappointing follow-up to Collier's earlier works.]

When I had read a few pages of Tom's A-Cold, by John Collier, I thought that the author of that highly original book His Monkey Wife had given us another After London. For Mr. Collier has taken the alarmists, who predict the collapse of civilisation, at their word and has drawn England in the nineteen nineties when, after wars, plagues, and famines have done their worst, what is left is almost exactly like what Jefferies described in the Relapse into Barbarism, the first part of After London. The towns are in ruins, the rivers have been choked up in swamps, the forests have extended to twenty times their size; the cats have reverted to the grey...

[The entire page is 636 words long]

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