Other Fiction LeBlanc, Maurice: The Frontier v.1.0 July 4, 2009

[Sonist]

Maurice LeBlanc: The Frontier (1912)

"The Frontier" is not at all the sort of novel that the engaging audacities Of Arsene Lupin have taught us to expect from its author. It has the sure dramatic instinct, the logical evolution of facts and incidents, the deft manipulation which binds them into a compact whole, the brilliant execution which have distinguished the Arsene stories. But at bottom it is concerned with an idea rather than with the telling of a tale. Its idea is, once more, that old. old idea of the conflict between the old and the new, between fathers and sons, between the intense convictions of yesterday and to-morrow. The form in which M. Le Blanc recreates it is that of the conflict between devotion to country and de*votion to that latest ideal, world-wide Peace. The father is a rugged old French patriot who fought in the war with Germany, whose heart is still bitter, and whose hate flames quickly at the thought of Alsace and Lorraine. The son is a professor of history whose studies have taught him how vain are bloodshed and violence. The scene is at the father's home, on the frontier, and he himself precipitates the war between France and Germany that comes crashing along in the last few chapters like a thunderstorm out of a Summer sky. Woven in with this intense and agonizing emotional drama that goes on between father and son. and woven so cleverly that the very doing of it excites one's admiration, Is one of those fateful outbursts of elemental human passion which French novelists are accustomed to present as matters of course.

From The New York Times Review, Published: June 9, 1912

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I took the text from ManyBooks.com and re-formatted it a bit.

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