Raymond Knister, a young Canadian writer, has produced in White Narcissus a first novel of very considerable charm. It is a supremely atmospheric story, in which dark and introspective moods are developed and elaborated somewhat at the expense of the plot. Mr. Knister's prose is an excellent medium for the expression of his emotional attitudes; it never flags and never becomes clogged or difficult. The result is a novel of memorable color, and of regrettably thin substance.

Richard Miln, the protagonist of the story, is a successful advertising man, who was born in a remote and rural section of a Canadian Province. He returns from time to time to the neighborhood of his youth—partly to renew old associations and to recover the sense of his own identity. Behind the nostalgia which draws him back to the country there is a deeper motive. He always returns to renew the offer of his love to Ada Lethen, the sweetheart of his childhood. Richard is convinced of Ada's love for him, but he never quite succeeds in breaking through the emotional barriers which her strange home had erected about her. Ada was the daughter of a farmer, a man whose marked superiority had caused his neighbors to suspect and distrust him, and whose curious temperament had more than once suggested his insanity. Since a quarrel which Richard Miln could remember from his boyhood, Lethen had not spoken to his wife. For years the Lethen's had lived in bitter silence which was endurable at all only because of Ada. Thus Ada Lethen was bound to her home by a variety of emotional forces—by her love for her father and her perception of his isolation, and by her pity for her mother.

The somber atmosphere which broods over the Lethen household, and which colors the outlook of every one associated with it, is symbolized by Mrs. Lethen's white narcissi, into whose culture she had turned all the interest denied by her emotional life. Richard Miln's determination to take Ada away with him is realized after an almost hopeless struggle, and the solution involves such relatively prosaic matters as foreclosures upon mortgages and suits at law. Nevertheless, Mr. Knister preserves the atmosphere of his book intact. If the symbolism upon which it is based seems, at times, a little awkward and obvious, it has at least the merit of consistency.