[In the following review, Barry considers Full Circle to be a provocative book.]

This is no novel about the future, in the ordinary sense of that phrase. It is not compounded of Wellsian characters or situations, but of men like our neighbors, like Francis Bacon or General Marbot, in situations such as men have faced before. Suppose all is lost, since the economic pundits tell us all may so easily be lost, and civilization as we know it shattered to chaos, to the dark ages and worse again, to beyond the bronze age if you will—what then? Annihilate cities, tear down communication, destroy all material amenities: then let us look at these people of Mr. Collier's, a group of men and women roughly dressed in skins, furnished with a little metal and normal wits, entrenched in a stronghold on the Hampshire hills. These again are not men of the future in the accepted sense, but men of today living in a tomorrow grown out of our today's fears. It is a world of Hoovervilles: and Hooverville is not of the future.

Because this is an important and lovely novel which I like to think will be read and enjoyed widely, I have begun by stressing the fact that Full Circle is not a fantasy: unless one were to call Candide fantastic. Also, leaving aside its basic implications, it happens to be a first-rate narrative. It is packed with adventure—bloodshed and craft, romance and tragedy, crime. There are rich, unforgettable characters in it whose desires and actions alike convince and surprise one. There is brilliant observation throughout, dazzling intensity so that one remembers every tiny detail, the very look and mood of the dawn-hour when Swindon stronghold wakes to rapine, or when the wild mare runs over the downs, or Harry after the counter-attack carries Rose through the frosty night. It is written in gracious and lively prose, not mannered but agreeable to the inner ear because it is personal to the author while betraying what good company he has appreciately kept among his forerunners in literature.

In the savage stronghold there are old men who remember the vanished world, the one we know. One recalls most keenly an autumn day's shooting in the 1930's. Another reveres not merely learning itself but the undying ghost of all art, all statecraft: a tie between mankind and its deepest vision. So tradition lingers on. One comes with a sharp sting of emotion, so actual does the story seem, on a tattered Carraci over the fireplace of the great dining-hall, on hearing young men speak of the sea they have never seen and of the dead men whose eyes turn to pearls in that strange tumble of multicolored water. So it would, so it should be, one feels. Equally right is the growing up of another tradition, new for the new world, which is discernible in the reactions and behavior of the younger men. There is no diminution of passion or ambition or humanity here, despite the squalor. There is no lack of greatness or great vileness. There are virtuous men whom some praise and all follow when the virtue burns, who when they themselves falter into darkness can still compel others to follow or force them towards the light.

The story itself centers round a raid made on a distant settlement for the purpose of obtaining more women: the group with which the story is concerned has definite ideas about improving and controlling the “family.” Harry, leader of the raid, captures a woman unlike the women of his own group and one whom he had seen previously under circumstances that fired his imagination. His chief is wounded, and under not entirely natural circumstances dies, leaving Harry as his obvious successor. Leadership and personal tragedy go hand in hand for him. Events culminate in the flight of the captured Rose, an attack on the stronghold by her group, the death of Harry's close friend, Crab the philosopher, and the final choice on the part of Harry to accept the evil in the world—he had not recognized it before—and to do good. All these main incidents are built up carefully and cleverly of delicate moods, moments, scenes, conversations, so that a very strong illusion is created of participating, even more vividly than in much of life, in the events of the narrative. Mr. Collier's appeal to the visual sense is really remarkable; outside of poetry I do not know what other writer can so conjure up color and movement, sound and scent. And what surprising knowledge he has of human nature!

Full Circle is even better than his first novel, His Monkey Wife. Very much of the moment, this author is not so much unafraid of sentiments and passions as unaware that one could or need be afraid of them. He would speak, one feels, as his elders would not dare of the beautiful, the true and the good. After so much desiccated intelligence conscientiously devoid of feeling as we have had from “young” writers this is almost touchingly delightful. Mr. Collier, armed with a fine intelligence springing from the heart, with erudition and breadth of fancy excitingly mingled, and a singular mastery of his craft has remained utterly unaffected by influence that made many lesser post-war writers a nightmare for the old and a pitfall for the growing. He plainly wants to move his readers. Few living novelists carry forward the tradition of letters as bravely, or display a more pleasing narrative gift. Also he has something very definite to say.

From living today as man does in material and spiritual insecurity, harassed, however secretly within himself, by fears of international catastrophe and domestic crisis, each individual may well now and then anticipate a tomorrow of after-calamity such as this book describes. We speak of civilization. Some say it is cracking up. What then if it cracks? What can we look to save, what endures? The pleasures of appreciation in strain of music, phrase of verse, line or composition in the visual arts—all gone for ever and the brave spirit and desire too that made and enjoyed them? Gone Charlemagne and Loyola and Bentham, the weary beauty of last year's Marathon winner, Machiavelli and Chaplin, the great villains and happy servants, all of them, never to be re-echoed or repeated again? If the cities, the communication and the comfort go is there to be nothing but a herd of yellowish-pink monkeys grubbing and shivering in the undergrowth?

We have to ask ourselves this: it is one of the functions of art continually to make us ask such questions, and another to suggest—not give—the answer. It must be a clear and pregnant, a provocative answer, like the note from a distant bell. Such Mr. Collier gives here. Few who read Full Circle will fail to hear it, or fail to be grateful to its author, or a little richer in spirit.