[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 brindled wild cat; dogs, horses and cattle are all wild. There is a talk of wolves, which shows that Whipsnade has been working well, and man himself has become a savage beast. But where Jefferies presented us with a sentimentalised feudalism, Mr. Collier shows us verminous and lonely groups of outlaws, who subsist on rabbits, and when undisturbed are able to grow a few potatoes. The more sordid and hopeless the surroundings, the more necessary it seems to give the reader a really heroic hero. Here we are given a magnificent young aspirant to the chiefdom who is coached by the oldest member of the clan—who, it is odd to reflect, must be living amongst us somewhere and just beginning to study Greek.

Mr. Collier says in an Introduction:

To describe emotions and events totally incompatible with present-day life here it was absolutely necessary to choose some other scene: the question was—When or where?

He looked about—to Neolithic times and to savage islands, but these had their drawbacks, so he chose the setting of this tale. Thus the book is not written out of a deep emotion of hatred as Jefferies wrote, nor out of a deep conviction such as H. G. Wells would have brought to it. This is fatal. The clan has a tradition of the finer things of life, represented by the memories and the knowledge of the classics, of the old man. Unfortunately when it comes to a test, the finer things of life come to mean no more than the ability to murder a sick man under the pretence of healing him, and primitive contraptions for staging a terrific massacre of the Swindon folk which would have looked well in a book by Rider Haggard, but which is out of place here. The entire absence of nobility nullifies the sympathy we are expected to feel for the father. The descendants of a curate and a girl-guide would have been worth all this ignoble clan and we might have wept on seeing them kneeling on the rabbit-bitten turf. It was a mistake to leave out religion and morality; they were necessary, and the conditions would have produced them. It was also a mistake to let the second generation revert to the Intelligentsia and begin to discuss each other's motives as though they were hikers who had been reading Shaw. Tom's A-Cold is therefore a disappointing book from the author of that beautiful and brilliantly comic story, In a Green Shade (Joiner and Steele). The description of the Swindon girl, Rose, and the attack on the tower, is very good indeed. But if Mr. Collier was a cat this is not what he would have drawn.