Another Mammoth

Too LITTLE LOVE (562 pp.)--Robert Henriques--Viking ($3.75).

"Briskly she took his face between her hands and kissed it." So runs the last sentence of British Author Robert Henriques' new novel. Readers who carve a path through close to 600 pages to reach this happy but none-too-rare windup are likely to wish that the briskness had turned up earlier. For Too Little Love, which encompasses three generations and describes Britain's social revolution between 1926 and the present day, is the sort of monsterpiece in which there are so many wheels to keep turning that only a Tolstoy or a Melville could do the job without putting the reader to sleep.

Author Henriques, who wrote a fine novel in No Arms, No Armour (TIME, Jan. 15, 1940), this time presents the reader with a vast old ancestral seat in the Cotswolds and loads it to the attic with the customary full complement of characters: greying squire, hotheaded scion, beloved old butler, battered old gamekeeper, wheezing old nanny, skittish young parlormaid and a clutch of family friends. Most of their personal histories, doggedly spelled out over 20 disruptive years, are used to provide a social commentary ranging from fox hunting, anti-Semitism and high-class adultery to the rise of the black-marketeer and the policies of the Labor government.

Sandwiched in, like slices of the thinnest liverwurst between hunks of whole wheat, are a host of births, marriages and deaths which struggle in vain to introduce a human note, to suggest a human heart. British society, pipe these muffled voices, has taken a frightful batting around, but life goes on, and there's life in the old dog yet. Things aren't too good, but in some ways they're better--and they'd have been very much better from the start if only Britons had tried to love one another a bit more. To which conclusion tired readers will only wish to add that nothing would provoke a warmer upsurge in the contemporary breast than the lopping of a couple of hundred pages off the contemporary novel.

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