Miss Johnson is distinguishable from the many intelligent novelists of the day by the fact that she is not in the least afraid of people who are ordinary and good. Most writers would run a mile to avoid such people as material for fiction, partly for fashionable reasons (someone might murmur "Priestley," and then where would they be?), but principally because the virtuous are so very difficult to do well. But characters of simple goodness, when realised in fiction without either insipidity or sentimentality, are encountered by the reader with a delight that is quite unforgettable. What a pleasure it is to think of Trollope's Mr. Harding, or of Peter Schulz, the old Professor of Music in Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe. Miss Johnson attempts nothing on that level, but her new book [World's End] shows that she is sensitive to the quality of natural goodness and can present it to the reader when she sees it. And yet the world which she depicts is one which many novelists would have wanted to cram with nicely touched-up iniquities: a needy, uncertain, semi-artistic group living at World's End, Chelsea. The most disreputable of them are the drink-soaked pianist Sipe and his worthless wife, Irene, about whom there is something of the flavour of an early Huxley (Coleman or Spandrell): but, if they are less witty and horrifying, they are also more real. At the heart of the book is a love-story, although the lovers are seen nine years after marriage, not a few months before as usual. Arnold Brand is middle-class, intelligent, wanting to write, often unemployed and generally depressed: the footling jobs that do come his way—snobbish little travel agencies and so on—bore him to death. Doris is humorous and good-tempered and wretchedly overworked in a draper's shop. Brand is miserably conscious of failing to provide for his wife, indeed at times he is kept by her; his shame makes him unkind to her and drives him into a flirtation with a second-rate dancer named Rosary, who hovers pathetically on the edge of the stage world. He does not want Rosary when he is happy; but when he is unhappy she represents for him a different world, a world in which he need feel no shame. That is well observed. Arnold and Doris live in a top-back room which they rent from Ma Hogben, and in this character, which might easily have become a shapeless receptacle for traditional Cockney good nature, the author has been uncommonly successful….

Round these figures the story moves with easy command of dialogue and invention of incident; and all the time we hear rumbling in the background the Big Noises and the Big Guns; wars and rumours of wars; the hateful mass-cruelties and stupidities. All the World's End people (except Macdonald, the Communist downstairs) are of the sort which for generations has regarded foreign affairs as something to be read about in the papers after breakfast and then left to their betters; and now they are caught in that terrible problem of our day: that the precise moment when we all feel that we can no longer afford to remain idle spectators should also be the moment which demands, even of the experts, more experience and knowledge and judgment than ever before. What sane idealist in England would not feel less sure of his own wisdom after being Foreign Secretary for a week? Ma Hogben is of course resolutely isolationist; Sipe shrugs his shoulders and retires, desperate but undeceived, to Montparnasse; Brand, broken but also strengthened by the loss of his wife in childbirth, leaves with Macdonald to join the International Brigade in Spain. He is doing what he believes to be right; but is it right? and, if so, for how many? As a novelist, Miss Johnson is not obliged to deliver judgment; it is a tribute to the sincerity of her book that it raises the whole question (without in the least solving it) of the relationship between "the world of the street corner and the world beyond the horizon."