[In the following review, Southron claims that in The Cat's Cradle Warner is "at her most beguiling best. " ]

"Our unhappiness transcended our egoism, and by degrees by a complicated process of advances and withdrawals, exchange of looks, fusion of silences, we fell deeply in love with each other. After that she lived with me . . . and now my whole life was transfigured, full of entertainment and delight. . . . Naturally, there was a good deal of talk about it—embassies always gossip." Which tells the story.

To begin with, you could hardly fail, even were no name attached, to recognize the writer. And, to proceed, the love affair was on the plane where the infrequent literary-human Alices meet in gentle, far too rare felicity; one party to the blissful, amorous interlude being a young embassy attaché, and the other—you have guessed it!—a cat. A Siamese, but no ordinary Siamese. "Beautiful, sensitive, unappreciated .. . an exquisite storyteller, in the purest, most classical tradition of narrative." His Schéhérazade, the attaché called her.

It was Haru who made it mockingly clear that the folk tales that have been told, with variations, all over the globe from time immemorial need no ethnological explanation; having been murmured to children in their cradles, in the one language that is "catholic, explicit, unvarying"; of which "every child picks up an inkling"—cat. These are the tales on which the kittens of all the ages have been brought up by their nursing mothers. They are the cat's diploma as universal nursemaid.

Here, following a thirty-two-page introduction, which sets the scene and authoritatively clinches the argument, are sixteen of the tales collected by the attaché from his large family of cats of all degrees of gentility or female rascaldom. Bluebeard figures in one; but through a long-forgotten daughter. The Marquisate of Carabas and Odin's birds crop up in others. But these, and the rest, are subtler, far less obvious than the cosmopolitan human folklore stories which had their distant origin in the cat world; and, since they are direct from source, their dispassionate, feline objectivity has suffered neither taint nor dilution.

Literature has surely much for which to thank the young attaché and his unconventional, chance-met feminine collaborator (not the cat), who are among the few grown-up humans—perhaps the only ones unless we may include Mr. Hartman, who supplied the captivating illustrations—who can, today, talk cat. It is distressing to consider what a loss man has suffered, these thousands of years, through not having retained, beyond babyhood, the ability to speak and understand it.

We very greatly fear that what the attaché and his admiring assistant dreaded will happen. The "editor" will be accused of having made the stories up. But let not this reviewer, at any rate, be guilty of the antireal enormities forecast by the two enthusiasts, who were far from underrating the difficulty of establishing the projected book's claim to be regarded "as a serious work of scholarship." Let us eschew such words as delicacy, fragrant, fantasy and such a phrase as "ideal for cat-lovers," to quote only a few of the anticipated verbalisms that sent shudders through the collector and his adviser. Let it not be said, as they did, that only scholars of Chinese, "accustomed to a tonal language," could be expected to understand the "fine shades of meaning" in the cat-talk.

Enough that here is a banquet of stories (fables, parables, what you will) to suit the most fastidious of literary epicures; salted, spiced and sauced with irony, satire and ghostly, evanescent wit. The menu card may suggest, here and there, a reminiscent dish, but savoring it you find it wholly new.

In short, The Cat's Cradle-Book is Sylvia Townsend Warner at her most beguiling best; using, invariably, the one right word, presenting outrageous situations with cool detachment; delighting you with her artistry and giving you furiously to think, with her deadly indictments.

Besides all this, it is a gem of bookmaking.