["An Old Captivity"] is a strangely ordered tale. For the most part it holds the interest skillfully, keeps you pegging away page after page, unwilling to put the book down. Mr. Shute can spin a yarn in cracking good prose, and since through three-quarters of the novel he knows expertly what he's talking about …, you enjoy and feel confidence in the accumulation of data and details through which the story moves and has its being.

For this is a fictional record of an airplane flight from Scotland to Greenland, via Iceland, thence to Cape Cod, the Vineland of the Norse Vikings….

Mr. Shute is a practical man about airplanes and pilots qua pilots. But there's a broad streak of romantic mysticism underneath, and this flowers forth in the last quarter of this novel in a way to put to shame even James Hilton in his "Lost Horizon" or [Rudyard] Kipling's "Brushwood Boy." But to this reader it came as a shock and disappointment. It did not seem to him apt or well done, even of its kind, with its Eskimo curse and its transmigration hocus-pocus and its mystic conundrumry—was it a vision or a waking dream? And that brings us back to the opening pages in this oddly put together yarn.

For no apparent reason, so far as the story is concerned, a psychiatrist named Morgan and a Senior Master of Imperial Airways named Donald Ross meet on a train in France. The train is held up overnight and the two enter into conversation. "Do you do dreams and all that?" asks the airman. On being assured he does, the pilot mentions a strange, incomprehensible dream he had some five years ago: "You don't think I'd be likely to go crackers as I get older?" he asks. "I said gently, 'We've got a long evening before us. Would you like to tell me about it?'"

That's all. We never hear of the psychiatrist again, what he thinks of the tale, whether he ever gets to Italy. We hear nothing of the future of the airman either. The story of five years ago is not told in the first person or by the psychiatrist in the third person. It's a straightaway novel by the omnipotent novelist who has dangled a hanging introduction further to confuse us as we think over the tale after finishing it. It's a trick and a poor one.

But from page 9 to page 246 this is a first-rate and adult story of an imaginary expedition by plane to Greenland. Donald Ross had been a pilot on a Canadian airline for some years until the company he worked for folded up. Now he is back in England out of a job. A friend gives him a tip to the effect that a Professor Lockwood, an Oxford archaeologist, is planning an expedition to Greenland and is looking for an experienced pilot. Ross gets the job. The professor, with little realization of the danger, expense and time involved in such an undertaking, thinking only of his plans for proving to the world that Celts from Scotland or Ireland had preceded the Norse Vikings to Greenland, places the whole burden of preparation on the aviator. His daughter, Alix, a dowdy bluestocking and a snob, opposes the expedition. But when she finds she can't prevent it, she determines to go along, too. Between her and young Ross there is cordial dislike at first sight….

[The pilot] is a weary man when, after numerous adventures, they arrive on the Greenland plain where the real work is to begin. By the time that is finished he has cracked up and an overdose of the sleeping tablets, which had stopped working in small quantities, sends him off into a thirty-six-hour coma. During that time he has the dream of a thousand years ago when he was Haki and Alix was Hekja, Celts from the Scottish Highlands, boy and girl together scampering over the Greenland wastes until the Norsemen come under Leif Ericson and made the Scots their slaves. This dream is a North Country idyl of rather feeble proportions, or so it seems to me. But when the details of the dream are verified by later discoveries and strange markings set on stone, this reader lost all interest. There is no law forbidding the novelist to touch on ancient mysteries or deal with matters in heaven and earth of which our philosophy little dreams of. Explorers and adventure writers seem often to develop a mystical side. But Mr. Shute here lacks the touch.