Style is the man. The adage need not be changed in gender to include Miss West, for she writes with such force as to make most male writers appear effeminate. A rich style therefore demands a well-furnished mind, and this Rebecca West possesses. It would be easy to turn this review [of "The Meaning of Treason"] into grouped quotations to display the vigor of her thought, the shape of her sentences, her knowledge of psychology, her sense of terror and of exile, her humor, the profundity of her ethical judgments, her vignettes of people and her panoramas of places.

Surprisingly, considering the subject, this book contains intimate descriptions of buildings in London, interiors and exteriors, that make it, in my judgment, the best writing on architecture and the looks of cities since Ruskin. This sense of solid reality is a part of the maturity of Miss West's style, which tacitly assumes literary culture, and builds on the creative inventions of Shakespeare and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Henry James and D. H. Lawrence….

Only in structure is the book open to cavil…. [The first two-thirds, the story of William Joyce, are] full and well proportioned. But the last two sections, which tell of John Amery and some less-known figures, fall off in interest as the pattern of horror repeats itself less dramatically; and the epilogue, generalized and in a different key, does not equal in power the moral meditations casually interspersed in earlier pages. Perhaps Miss West wishes to show the littleness, the dull mechanical pattern of evil. Perhaps she does not wish to rest her case for the meaning of treason upon one or two traitors. But the structure over-all is not successful, for the first two-thirds is greater than the whole….

Even if presented in a fumbling fashion, however, the theme of this book would be impressive….

Though [Miss West] reveals heart-sickening sordidness and treachery in her sad subjects, she witnesses that even in these caged half-men "time revealed to them, which they had not expected, that man can score a victory over fate other than its reversal." She is not a preacher, but a tragic moralist. Like Auden, she realizes that "the guilt is everywhere."…

For all its sharp detail, the book has limitless horizons. By implication it contains fundamental criticism of those fantastic nightmare empires of Hitler and Mussolini. The story of William Joyce as an outcast in London helps us to understand the bitter creations of Karl Marx. Miss West can take a trial at the Old Bailey, or in Nuremberg, or in a Carolina town, and make it ring with the overtones of Kafka's "The Trial," see it with the sharp compassion of Dickens' "Bleak House."…

Courage is in this book, as well as treason. The theme is not desperate, for conscience and the need for truth move some of the trapped traitors as well as the judges and the juries. Certainly this is one of the best books to come out of the war: a great subject seriously treated, in spite of its horrifying materials.

It has a passionate, almost a religious, integrity. Yet as Rebecca West handles it, it is a good story also, more exciting than any detective shocker, and filled with people in the London air.